Harddrive failure

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iOprah

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Hello,

I have a rather old Lacie 1 TB hard drive, that failed the other day. I opened it up and found that instead of one hard drive there were 4 hard drives in it. Now I am pretty sure they are raided together, this is the hard drive I think and if its not it in the same line. Anyway the enclosure's broken and I need to get the data off these hard drives. So I would think i can just buy an enclosure and get plug them in and use them? Is that correct? if so could i use this? if not is there any other sub $100 one I can use or any other way I can do this. Thanks in advanced if you help me, I have almost $2000 worth of royalty-free content on this drive.

Basically I want to know of anyway to raid 4 hard drives that were presumably formerly part of a raid set, without loosing the data.
 
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Oh, Yeah I have tested all the drives they all to appear to work, they power on and spin up also i scanned them with data rescue and it found files so they all work as far as I can tell.
 
It IS possible that the Raid Controller went bad and could be replaced. You just have to make sure when you set the raid back up that it doesn't format the drives in the process. Also you'd need to make sure it's running in the same raid type as before.
 
If your raid controller went out you need to replace it with the exact same make/model to get the array to mount properly. This is the only major flaw in hardware raid setups. If one drive failed the raid should recover and rebuild itself (assuming it's a raid 5) this can take a very long time -- what size are the 4 drives that are in there? If it's two separate raid 1's (ie. 4x 500GB)'s then the drives will mount fine by themselves as it's just a mirror. Did you see it as one 1TB partition?
 
The 4 drives were 320 gb each and they all worked so it was not a drive failure.
 
Sometimes it can be hard reconstructing RAIDs. If you do try to set it up with the same or a different RAID controller, be very careful not to rebuild or re-initialize the RAID, you could lose all your data.

Programs such as Zero Assumption Recovery can take hard drives that were part of a RAID and recover the data, even if the original RAID is not functional. I've used this program many times, both in RAID and non-RAID situations; it has a very high success rate. Here is a tutorial on recovering RAIDs with ZAR.
 
gothroach said:
Sometimes it can be hard reconstructing RAIDs. If you do try to set it up with the same or a different RAID controller, be very careful not to rebuild or re-initialize the RAID, you could lose all your data.

Programs such as Zero Assumption Recovery can take hard drives that were part of a RAID and recover the data, even if the original RAID is not functional. I've used this program many times, both in RAID and non-RAID situations; it has a very high success rate. Here is a tutorial on recovering RAIDs with ZAR.
Click to expand...

Hey, Can I just use any enclosure for this?

thanks
 
Oprah said:
Hey, Can I just use any enclosure for this?

thanks
Click to expand...

You can use any combination of external enclosures, USB dongles, or internally-connected hard drives, so long as you're able to hook up all hard drives that were in the raid at the same time (i.e. you could have two drives external and two drives internal).
 
I am not sure if it fully supports OS X formatted volumes. I know that I've used it many times on Linux drives, and a few times on Unix drives, so it may be possible; but the filesystem on OS X is quite different from ext3 or xfs. You would, most likely, need a Windows machine to run it on, I haven't tried running it through virtualization software before.

You said it was a 1TB drive and it has 4x320GB drives? That would most likely make it a RAID-5, I think. Did it have around 900gb of formatted space?
 
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It had a little under a TB so like 939, I have a pc to run the software, though.
 
Well considering it was one of the first drives to offer 1tb in one single package not really and it cost almost $500....like 4 years ago.
 
ENZ0 said:
ur hard drive rlly fail..
Click to expand...

Enzo,

This post, like many of your other posts in the tech help section, makes no grammatical sense and also has no useful information for helping Oprah. If you would like to post gibberish on these forums please go to the off-topic or forum games section. People in the tech help forums are trying to get help/help other. Your useless posts are not wanted here.

Sorry for posting this in your thread Oprah. I do not know much about RAID recovery and hope you can recover your data.
 
metro said:
Enzo,

This post, like many of your other posts in the tech help section, makes no grammatical sense and also has no useful information for helping Oprah. If you would like to post gibberish on these forums please go to the off-topic or forum games section. People in the tech help forums are trying to get help/help other. Your useless posts are not wanted here.

Sorry for posting this in your thread Oprah. I do not know much about RAID recovery and hope you can recover your data.
Click to expand...

Thanks, and its fine.
 
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