[sdiy] OT: how to save a dead Raided Drive?

[Ben Lincoln]

Hi Dan.

If it's two 250GB drives in there, the data was probably striped across 
both of them. IE you would need both of them working to get any of the data.

The first thing you could try doing would be transplanting the two 
drives into another of the same LaCie enclosure (you can probably find 
one on eBay if nothing else). I've had one of my external enclosures 
fail even though the drive was fine.

If the drives themselves don't work, the more hardcore equivalent would 
be to get two identical Western Digital drives and try swapping out the 
controller hardware (the PCB that's part of the hard drive, not the one 
in the enclosure). It's possible that even that might not be enough, but 
at that point you're talking about things like cracking open the hard 
drive case to transplant the platters (which you basically need a clean 
room for). The short answer is that I would try the enclosure transplant 
first (again, into the exact same model of enclosure), and if that 
doesn't work, start googling DIY hard drive recovery. The RAID situation 
is going to make it more complicated.

- Ben

Dan Snazelle wrote:
> I am asking on this list because I know that many of you have a lot of experience with computers:
>
>
> tonight i had the worst possible thing happen to my computer
>
> my 3yr old 500 gig lacie ext hard drive died. (and no, i had not backed it up...money for a new drive had been non-existent)
>
>
>
> this had three years worth of Logic song projects (many unmixed) ALL My datasheets, schematics, etc, as well as all my family's photos, etc.
> and over 100 gigs of itunes.
>
> now since it is 2 WestDigital 250gig drives in the box, i am assuming it is a raid setup with a disk controller card of some kind
>
> one thing i see happen a lot with my clients is that the disk controller dies,
>
> BUT then i wonder, if i get these drives into their own new enclosure, since they were in a RAID array, how do i get the
> computer to read them properly? does the raid system split the data among the 2 drives, or is it really just 2 separate drives that could 
> be read separately?
>
> it is very unlikely that both drives would mechanically fail at once right?
>
>
> anyway.....
>
> at least i got my OTA problem solved
>
> :(
>
> any help, thoughts , appreciated
>
>
> thanks
>
>
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