LACIE Hard Drive Issue

[James978]

Hi guys, i have had for years a 500gb Lacie Big Disc Hard drive, and the USB2 & Firewire ports have become lose over time & i decided i'd check what sort of drive was inside so that i could order a new one off the net.

So i opened her up to find 2 x Maxtor 250gb hard drives inside running as one. Unfortuantly as i was putting it all back together i managed to snap a couple of pins on the boards (not the IDE cable or power). I then decided i should put the hard drives (1 at a time) into my pc to take all my data off so as to put onto my new external drive i had bought.

The problem is i can see the drive/s but it's asking me to format the drives before i can look at them. Obviously i don't want to do this just yet as i have ove 400gb of stuff i'd like to keep hold of. (The drive has been used on pc's/laptops using XP, Vista & 7)

I've tried downloading a few data recovery programs which tell me i can't access the drives until they are formated. One did flash up to say they were damaged, but nothing has happened to the drives since i last was able to open them.

I'm feeling that the issue is because they were used in parrallel to form one big hard drive rather than 2 and now i'm trying to read them one at a time. Can anyone suggest anything before i go to one of those data recovery companies??

 

Also, the pins that i snapped... i'm thinking of chucking the now redundant enclosure, but what if i were to solder the snapped pins straight to the plug?? I know it's a bodge but i only need it together for a few hours while i transfer everything back off.

 

Any thoughts??

 

Thanks

[Jelly Bean]

James you snapped the pins off the mainboard?

 

You could try to solder them back on or use an external hard drive case or connect the hard drives to another computer.

[James978]

Yes there was a 5 pin plug from one board to another. when i fitted it all back together i somehow didn't see the plug and the pins snapped. I'll go give it a go now at soldering them back together.

 

As for using another hard drive case or connecting to another computer, i have done this and that is when i get the message asking me to format the discs.

 

When the 2 drives work together as one, is software/code put onto one drive to tell the pc/laptop to recognize them as one istead of the 2??

[Jelly Bean]

Have a go at soldering be very carefull and only use a tiny spot of flux and solder.

[James978]

Ok, so i've carefully solder it back together, but it's still asking me to format the drive to use :(

 

So close but yet so far!!

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, when the two drives were first connected inside the computer after the problem with the case, did the drives show up in "My Computer" if so did you try a right click on them and what showed then? was there an option to open? if so what did you get?

Provided there has been no damage to the drives own firmware/software, and mechanical parts, it should be possible to get at the data on them.

If however there has been some damage done because they were powered up with those damaged pins, it may mean specialist attention which isn't cheap.

Nev.

[LinkindinkinPark]

drives are set up in RAID 0 config - theres no chance of recovering data from a single drive

 

if the board cant be repaired your only hope is to send them off to data recovery house to have the drives rebuilt as a RAID pair. if you repair the board make sure you put the drives back in the same way they came out otherwise they wont work properly

[James978]

Just a quick update. I've been trying to do a drive repair on the hard drives for the last couple of days. BUT... i've found out the drives are reading as RAW instead of NTFS. Someone said it could me the MBR. I'll see if this program that's running and fix the missing holes. If not i guess i'll have to send it off to be repaired.

[Dalo Harkin]

Just buy a PCI RAID controller card like this RAID card, Computing, Collectables, raid card 4 port items at low prices on eBay.co.uk

 

Add the drives into the PC connect to the RAID card, add in RAID cards when the BIOS posts have like their own mini post where you can press an F key and configure a RAID setup. configure them back as RAID 0, I am not too sure if this would work, but just throwing it out there if you end up with no other choice, rather than an expensive data recovery company.

 

What pins exactly are you referring to that you broke? pic if possible?

 

For future reference I would perform manual backups onto DVD-R for anything you could never replace such as photos etc, even with Mirrored RAID it only duplicates the data, it does not help if your system decides to eat the disks

Edited May 13, 2010 by Dalo Harkin