Simultaneous failure of two Lacie d2 FW hard drives

Firstly, get yourself an empty firewire enclosure. It's a possibility that the bridge has failed in both of your existing ones ... though why it would happen simultaneously, barring some form of power surge, is a mystery to me.

Try installing your dead HDs into the new enclosure. You may get lucky.

From that point, I would download Data Rescue X which I have had great luck with in recovering data from drives which would not mount. I believe they still offer a trial version.

Then you should be all over LaCie's ass trying to get replacements.

(Oh, and I'm moving this to the Genius Bar, where it belongs.)

The bridge is between the port and the drive - it's the doohickey that translates the data between the firewire interface and the ATA interface of the drive.

You will need a 3.5" enclosure. You should be able to pick one up fairly inexpensively. The external case that I use has a Genesys bridge chip in it which, although I haven't had any problems, I have read some bad things about. You should look for one with an Oxford chipset in it.

You mention that a DVD drive on the same chain is still functioning. I'd suggest that you open that case up and try replacing the DVD drive with the HD but you've expressed that you've never done this before and I'd hate to see you void the warranty or break the DVD drive.

My PB hard disk crashed a few months back and I had only a partial backup.

I bought a bridge and a new internal drive and Data Rescue. I was able to recover EVERYTHING and replace the internal drive for about a thousand less than Apple had offered offered.

Just as a note, the only problem I encountered with Data Rescue is that some of my filenames were truncated after recovery. I waited until I got Tiger and fixing this was relatively easy.

Good Luck.

-awal

It's a fantastic program. It was able to recover 99.9% of the files I lost. The other solutions I looked at didn't come close.

Oh yeah. I should have mentioned, if the new enclosure DOESN'T fix the problem with the drives not mounting, you will need to buy a new large HD and install it internally in your G4. (Easy. Really)

Then you'll have somewhere for the recovery software to save your lost data.

I had a friend whose terabyte drive crashed and burned. My 250gig drive attached to my G5 I had for a year, now it wont mount. I have 2 new 500gb drives hooked up to an X-serve that have twice randomly become unreadable by the OS and needed to be formated.

I wonder about Lacie sometimes...

Thanks for the heads up on Data Rescue btw,

Sure! Installing it internally is a breeze. Saves you some cash, too. Granted, if you discover that the drive does mount when installed internally, you'll be buying a new external enclosure anyway.

4-pin is power and the 80 pin ribbon connector is the ATA. Hopefully you have a spare ATA cable ... or you can always disconnect the optical drive in the G4 and use those cables.

So, yeah:

1) Install drive internally. Make sure you've turned the computer off first.
2) See if the drive mounts.
3) If it doesn't mount, download Data Rescue trial version. (If it does mount, buy a new external enclosure, and make a fresh backup just in case!)
4) Install and run Data Rescue.
5) If the files are recoverable, buy a new HD to recover them to (unless you have room on your boot drive).

6) If files are recoverable, buy Data Rescue, run it and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yeah, disconnect the cables from the optical drive and attach them to the drive that won't mount.

*sigh* reading this brings a tear to my eye *sniff*

seriously, well done angus, (edit: and audiopollution) glad you recovered all that data.

yeah, i'm not sure what is up with lacie nowadays. i would just get an external FW400/800 3.5" enclosure of your choice and pop the maxtor into that one. much more cheap, scalable, upgradeable.

There is a large selection here.

If you're looking for a multi-bay enclosure, your options are limited if you want a case that will solely hold 3.5" hard-drives. Most multi-bay cases are designed to also accomodate 5.25" devices (such as DVD-Burners, etc.).

If you want a 2 drive enclosure, perhaps this?

That case is, however, Firewire 800.

I expect that you haven't upgraded your Sawtooth with a FW800 card. As far as I know, the enclosure will work fine, but at the reduced FW400 speed that you are currently used to. (Reference here.) I'm sure someone else will be able to let you know for sure.

my most recent 3.5" enclosure i bought was for the equivalent of about us$40 or so, and i got lucky because it looks great, has a cool blue/purple light, and is pretty much some 'no brand' taiwan thing but has a nice bridge chipset and was fun to open up and swap out drives and stuff ~ so much so that i dropped a very new maxtor 160gb from fiddling with it too much. anyway it's 7200rpm and i've just hooked it up to the PC to handle long stretches of bitTorrent action, sparing my iBook from that needless punishment

umm i'm definitely rambling here, yeah, the skilled appleInsiders could point you in the direction that your looking for, maybe even a chipset with built in RAID or something for fw800 if you have it. maybe start a new thread in current hardware? the geniuses have solved your genius bar issue now

i'm far away from the UK and US so right now i pretty much take my chances with affordable china/taiwan stuff and dealers that will hang around long enough to honour warranties

audiopollution or others could chime in, my current feeling is that if you do the multi-bay thing with FW800 then raid is an interesting option.

something to read up and geek out on, this whole RAID thing

if i am not mistaken, the key is the RAID controller, which is either software based (disk utility in mac os X) or hardware based (more expensive expansion bay set ups).

again, just throwing an idea out there, lets say a FW800 expansion bay thingy, throw two or three 7200rpm 8mb cache 3.5" 100+Gb drives in there, and in disk utility, you can format those two drives as RAID so that Mac OS X essentially sees just one big ass FW800 drive.

this is why you would do RAID in a high-end environment
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

for your needs, it could just be a fun thing to try out

i have not personally tried it so i may have to investigate, but it may be possible that Mac OS x disk utility allows you to properly do 'redundant' data writing, that means that even if one drive fails, the other still holds most if not all (?) of your data since data is duplicated across the multiple drives and the RAID controller (software or hardware) is supposed to be smart enough, in the higher-end stuff, to allow hot-swaps of drives, etc, etc. like i said, hey, maybe i found myself a weekend project here.

..................

edit: this is a good example of when DOING RAID IS JUST PLAIN SILLY

iPod Shuffle RAID
http://www.wrightthisway.com/Articles/000154.html

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edit2: here's what i was kinda talking about

http://support.clubmac.com/display.asp?r=518
~~~~~
Open Disk Utility and click the RAID tab. Drag the disks or volumes you want to use into the Disk list, and choose a scheme from the RAID Scheme pop-up menu.

Raid works with both SCSI and IDE/ATA hard drives. Both drives in the RAID must either be SCSI, or IDE/ATA. You cannot combine IDE/ATA with SCSI in a RAID.

There are two basic types of RAIDs.

"Striped" This is where you take two hard drives and combine them together to make one larger drive. This also speeds up the drives, as half of the information is written to each drive.

"Mirrored" This is where you have two hard drives with the exact same data. When a file is modified on one drive, the other is modified to mirror the original drive. When you mirror drives all drives should be the same size as the smallest drive is the size that all the drives use. Any additional space is unused and can not be accessed.
~~~~~~
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more crap from me...

found out about my fw400/usb2.0 to IDE 3.5" enclosure. uses the GL711 chipset, which is popping up in places instead of the Oxford911 chipset.

so far, i would have to say, no problems with GL711 chipset
linky:
http://www.genesyslogic.com/econtent...stcidx=3&SN=33

Here's what I would do in your position.

Forget about RAIDs for now. You can read up on them and implement one later as you'll have the hardware (and the software in OSX) to do so. In your case, you would want to mirror your drives for backup - rather than having a striped array - since your main concern is data protection.

Get the external enclosure and put your two drives in it.

Call one drive 'External Data 1' or something similar. Call the other drive 'Eternal Backup 1' or something similar.

Don't use the 'External Backup' drive to save your data. Make sure you just save to the 'Eternal Data' drive.

Set up a backup schedule in Retrospect or using to fully back up 'External Data 1' to 'External Backup 1' once a week. You can set it to only copy the changes you've made to the drive, as far as I remember. (You can make the backup interval fewer than 7 days ... it depends on how comfortable you are with losing a finite number of days worth of new files should the data drive fail.)

This way you always have a backup that's no more than 7 days old.

yesss.... wise and leet audiopollution has suggested a great pre-RAID-mirroring solution to get started with.


...angus... yeah, i'm not to sure about the whole DVD dual-layer thing, i think i'm willing to just skip that whole shebang and go straight to blu-ray or whatever for optical backups, otherwise double-backups to hard disks is the good solution for data integrity.


audiopollution...the thing that grabs me about mirrored raid is that you do essentially just one backup and the hardware (or os X disk utility) gives that piece of mind that every single bit of data is kind of checked twice and stored twice for all reads and writes ... or at least to my simple understanding that's how it makes me feel good.

i actually dropped a 1-month-old maxtor 160gb 7200rpm on the floor the other day, and i was like, hmm.... SMART says its doing okay since then, and chkdsk on windoze found just a few bad sectors, but my trust in it has gone out the window (heh... pun not intended but it seems to work)

This thread makes me want to do a good up-to-date backup.

Meanwhile, here's another interesting question... Can I create a RAID set with just a single partition on large drive? The reason I ask is that I have two drives in my G5, my original 160 GB and a 300 GB I added. I'd like to partition the 300 and setup one partition to mirror with the other drive via RAID 1. I'd have 160 GB of redundant storage plus another 140 GB of extra storage for less-critical files.

OMFG That is a fucking brilliant idea. That is SO what I could do with the 'compromised' 160gb 7200rpm maxtor. Make it into two partitions, giving a nice chunky double-redundant 70+GB backup RAID driveset. Or, if I'm feeling extra paranoid, triple-redundant with three partitions for a 50+GB backup RAID driveset.

Wow, *shakes fist* damn you SF Bay Area kids, always thinking outside the box. Come to think of it, you probably never heard of or seen this 'box' thing

Hmm.. Okay I should be able to test this out in several hours time when my dad comes back from his clinic i am so so close to getting my own Mac

I aim to have a report on my experience with this on 10.4.2, using Disk Utility to RAID, FW400 to IDE bridge GL711 chipset, Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 7200rpm 2mb cache 3.5"
(edit: i'll try and do a quick-and-dirty benchmark as well, one with one large .vob file and one with a whole bunch of files from the Applications folder or something)

Of course, the caveat is that if the drive completely fails or that one piece of hardware dies your screwed**, but as opposed to having to buy a second drive and a second drive enclosure, or a multi-bay enclosure, this really might be a good way for me to put that 1 drive through its paces to see how the data integrity holds up. If the drive completely dies, not a problem, since my critical stuff is on the iBook hard disk anyway, and core stuff (contacts, mail, calendar, etc.) is all on .Mac. I pull some CDRWs of the super critical non-.Mac stuff every month anyway, so...

Hmm cool... Why are we so obsessed with backing up? Is it 'normal' to be so jazzed up about this sort of stuff? heh...
I guess we've all learnt through hard personal experience of losing data at the very worst times possible. Particularly now that a good-running Mac is so important for day-to-day work and play.


**(edit2: xool i re-read your post and get your drift now... i might also try partitioning off some of the 160gb external and mirror raid that with my iPod mini just to see how that pans out. in your case, mirroring across two hard drives that way is a good idea)

raid on 10.4 is hella cool

you can basically make multiple raid sets out of multiple logical or physical drives and partitions. slice and dice any way you want. just for example:

okay so i partitioned my 160gb 7200rpm 'compromised' maxtor into 2 partitions and made that a mirrored raid.

speeds are good, in that the bottleneck is
10MB/sec average coming off the 4200rpm iBook 40gb drive.

write speeds are as one would expect, showing as
20MB/sec average onto the maxtor

this is through the FW400 to IDE bridge with GL711 chip as i mentioned before.

overall, this gives me at this stage quite a lot of peace of mind,
knowing that the RAID software is making sure the data in and out of the external drive is clean.

being double redundant, if the RAID software hits a bad sector on one mirror it should be smart enough to deal with it by using the other partition

in any case, if my house burns down, hopefully the two CDRWs of important stuff will survive

Erm ... if you're running a mirrored RAID on two partitions of the same drive your write performance will be cut in half.

I'm also not sure what the point of doing so is, except that it's a neat trick. If the drive fails, rather than a pile of sectors (which hopefully wouldn't span enough of the drive to affect both partitions), the whole point of having a mirrored RAID is down the drain.

I'd be careful!

Installing them internally is just fine. Save the bucks!

I agree. If you make a RAID with two partitions on the same drive you're not getting much benefit as far as redundancy (if the drive dies you still lose all your data) and you also take a speed hit as both writes have to happen to the same drive rather than happening in parallel to separate drives.

I think my idea mentioned a few posts above will work though and makes the best use of my current storage. The one problem is setting it up... I need an extra place for my data while I repartition the large drive. If I can fit it all on my smaller drive I'd be OK. Time for some HD spring cleaning.

It can't hurt, but I've never used them.

Actually, on second thought, it could hurt and I am only speaking from my recollection of the tales told of Norton Utilities. Disk Warrior seems to be well spoken of. Hopefully someone else here can give you some more feedback about it.

I've had good experiences with Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro. However, a version of Tech Tool comes with AppleCare and might be enough for your needs. My general go-to utility is still Apple's Disk Utility.

fair enough, i think its just a bit of a fun hack for me for now, if the drive dies i still have like i mentioned, from most to least critical, backups on .Mac, CDRW, the iBook hard disk itself.

like i said i dropped the drive and chkdsk windows shows a few bad sectors, 4kb or so, so just doing the RAID thing helps me emotionally, that, hey, well, i can still use this one-month-old drive to backup stuff and i prefer having the RAID software mirroring thing as something extra to warn me if the disk is dying, rather than a generic Finder error.

yup, write performance is cut in half, but i think it looks like, 10mbytes/sec is the maximum average read speed coming off the 4200rpm 2.5" iBook drive. the bottleneck is the read of the iBook drive, not the mirrored drive \