Or, well, it wasn’t.

Lacie sent a new PSU for it, didn’t do the trick, and I read around.

Seems the case for this model was just whoefully undersize, and heat kills the control card….

Forking out 600 Euro to a datarecovery company wasn’t worth it for me, but, I ripped out the samsung drive inside and installed it into my linux box.

After many hairs torn, hours on the phone with friends, I managed to mount the drive, and it works flawlessly under Linux, with alot of scripts.. ….

Needless to say, I promptly copied out all the information on it, and am currently going to put it under a chainsaw.

Lacie, never again. I’ve had computers since 1985, this was my first real HD issue.. and all really because LACIE doesn’t offer tools to mount their drives under a Windows enviroment..

The info here about the LaCie disc is also my experience and I’ve learned good stuff today. If I find a way of access the data currently now available on my LaCie BigDisc 320g, I’ll post my method here.

Thank

So it’s just outside warranty (Murphy gets me again). Since then I have tried accessing the drives from multiple machines, Windows XP, Mac OSX, Ubuntu Linux etc. I bought a SATA to USB2 connector and used that. No operating system understands the partitions. They can see them but not mount them.

Just recently I got hold of SpinRite. I created a bootable DVD, and plugged both the drives from the LaCie onto the PC mainboard via SATA. I then booted from SpinRite. I let SpinRite do it’s thing. It inspected all partitions, took about 7-8 hours to do both drives. The result – no errors – nada, nothin’, zilch, zip. No ECC errors, no sector errors, no nothing – the drives appear perfect.

So I start thinking it must be the mainboard in the LaCie housing, or the PSU. I tested the PSU this morning, and it seems fine. Multimeter shows ample voltage on the 12 and 5 volt pins without load.

So I’m down to thinking the mainboard is dead. Now I’m looking around for a replacement.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to keep this stupid device. I just want my data. I have family photos, home video, our freaking wedding and honeymoon on this thing. Photo’s of the kids growing up. I’m spewing!

LaCie have been as unhelpful as a company could possibly be – there is absolutely no way I will ever buy or recommend LaCie products again. In fact I will go out of my way to warn people away from them. If I see someone in a store looking at a LaCie product I will interrupt them and tell them not to bother. You can’t imagine for my dedication to this.

So what I want to know is if ANYONE ever has been successful at getting their data off one of these RAID0 striped drives – by any means? Is there a place online I can voice this with others. Getting my data off is not negotiable – it must happen.

Thanks for the article Dave – it’s interesting how you positive experience has attracted the negative ones.

I wish you all the best of luck. If anyone wants to get in touch please email jackofit [at] gmail [dot] com.

I had a 1T Lacie Big Disk (USB, 2xFW800, FW400) for about 18months now. It worked very well until all of a sudden, the device stopped working: when I plugged in the power supply, it would start to blink (the yellow LED on the PSU not the blue one on the disk). Since the drive never even started to spin, I thought, that the problem is most likely either the PSU or the controller on the disk. I then replaced the PSU with one from another Lacie Disk -> same result, the LED starts to blink when connected.

I then contacted LACIE what to do about the problem: I wanted a replacement of the disk/controller/or whatever was wrong because I purchased my product with 3 years of warranty. However I did NOT want to loose my data at any price. The answer from Lacie: “Yes, we might replace your drive, however we will not return your data”. Meaning: you send it in, they throw it away and send you a new one without your data. great.

In my dispair, I thought: hmhm…can’t be that difficult to read the data from the two disks, if I get hold on another LACIE Big Disk that allows me to replace the HD’s inside with mine. So I went to the store, bought a brand new Lacie BIG DISK (2T, since it was the only one on stock). Then I wanted to replace the two disks -> result: unable to read the data!! when plugged into my Mac, both disks start spinning, but then after a while a message appears “Unable to read medium, do you want to initialize it?” ((
I also tried swapping the two disks, to make sure it’s not just that the position of disk1 and disk2 are reversed in the new model…
So I belive they somehow changed the Firmware or the way they deal with the RAID0 in this new model…and that the controller is unable to read from the old drives….

Well. So I’m now sitting on a brand new LACIE disk without warranty (because I opened it to replace the HD) together with an older LACIE disk that won’t work and that now is also without warranty and two potentially fully functional HD’s (Seagate) out of the first BIG disk with all my data that I really really want to retrieve….

Arggggg!

Any suggestions are welcome for help!

In the mean time, I will have a look at the controller as suggested by Martin Morgan in post #3.

mat