Anyone up for a challenge?

I have a 3 year old external usb Lacie Bigdisk 500GB hdd. It is one of those that have 2 250GB inside which is what is going to make this tricky!

The drive contains 2 western digital 2500JB PATA drives and it is/has failed but I (like everyone else) really need the data off of it. I recently reformatted and that's the only copy I have of a lot of pictures. When I plug in the USB cable there is a longer than usual delay after the 'duh-ding' noise to when windows starts looking for autoplay. It does eventually open and I can get drive properties (correct amount of total/free capacity) and the first level of folders, but thats about it. I can limp my way through some of the files but mostly the computer just hangs when I drag a folder over. I've had a lot of success with testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk in the past but after transferring about 4MB of data it just hangs and the log shows a lot of data unreadable, file does not exist, etc. errors. The amount of pictures I've been able to see on the drive makes me thing neither drive is bad, and there were no errors in the file system when testdisk scanned that, so I'd be willing to bet the PATA-USB converter is the problem but I just don't know.
I'm a geeksquad agent at best buy to give you an idea of my technical prowess. (no really, I know what I'm doing!) I have access to plenty of hardware and software such as other enclosures, sector cloning software, lots of other stuff. I'll refrain from any comments about what my job implies for technical prowess! I'm well aware of my "colleagues" reputation for blunders but I would love to know for any customers with issues like my own what I should do.

Do I copy the drives to my computer sector by sector by plugging them in 1 at a time to the my mobo's IDE channel?
Could I then mount them as images and raid those?

I'm splitting up with my long time, photography major, girlfriend and her stuff is the stuff I would really love to be able to get back to her.

Matt Graham

P.S. Hook up from best buy in san antonio available upon request, thanks again

Can you open the drive and yank the drives in there? Aren't they probably just regular old PATA or SATA drives?

Try GetDataBack http://www.runtime.org/index.html

Does this housing support RAID 0? if so removing the drives could complicate things, you'd have to do a RAID reconstruction (to a spare 500Gig drive) first.

try restorer 2000pro it bypasses windows an reads the hardware directly, used it many times to recover data.

Thanks for the tips on other software, gonna try those now. As far as the raid and the harddrives inside go, they are indeed just regular old PATA drives but since there are 2 of them and they show up as 1, they must be raided together somehow. Right? question would be Raid 0 or JBOD. If I break a JBOD and just plug them into the computer any idea what happens? Gonna get some breakfast but I'll post results for those other software when I get back.

Matt

From what I have read about these things I'd say they are probably RAID 0 rather than JBOD.
If the thing is still working and the problem is a corruption rather than a hardware fault, removing the drives will just add an un-nessesary level of complexity to the task; try data recovery software first, then if that fails try removing the drives.

Lacie is pretty quiet on how they make two drives look like one. I'd email their customer service for further details prior to trying any more tools. For all I know they may have a proprietary interface in their enclosure, and your drives may not be straight-up PATA drives.

Once you know what you are dealing with, MRLinux' advice is the best that I know of for data recovery.

Somejoe7777 seems to have disappeared from this site, (and that's a shame) I am sure he could add far more detail than my limited knowledge.

Oh, I still lurk. I've been real busy at work lately ... I'm able to quickly scan the forums but only rarely get enough time to post.

Mr. Linux has it right ... Try GetDataBack first, see if it can recover anything. If not, probably one of the drives is going bad. Try removing them from the enclosure, try RAID Reconstructor to destripe the drives, then GetDataBack on the destriped image to recover the files.

When you're dealing with a drive that's gone bad, sometimes this will work, and sometimes not. It depends on what's wrong with the drive. If it's just a few bad sectors, you have a good shot to recover data. If other things are wrong with the drive that prevent it from seeking properly, you'll have to send it to data recovery specialists to take apart in the lab.

Glad to see you are still here, even more so after opening up the UPS package that my PC was shipped in. :-)