Buggered External La Cie Harddrive

[GLOC]

Okay, I have an external La Cie harddrive with a load of backups on it (fortunately I also have another harddrive with a duplicate set of the important photos I have).

The drive is detected by XP MCE, shows up as a drive in Explorer, trips 'Autoplay' but when I select the drive in Explorer it comes back with the error Unreadable or corrupted drive and cannot read data.

The drive is USB and Firewire and both come up with the same error.

What are the options?

Also, I am seriously thinking of getting some duplicate backup so that this thing doesn't happen again. RAID? What sort of costs would I be looking at for a pair 1Tb drives that I can mirror everything across? I am thinking of moving into the picture library side of business and I want to make sure that everything I have is covered.

[wilbo]

we'll have a play with it tonight.

[GLOC]

Originally Posted by wilbo

we'll have a play with it tonight.

And the harddrive?

[Cussy]

Gareth,
All should not be lost. I've had similar on a couple of personal drives and many times at work. As long as you didn't drop it, you are fine (from my experience dropping them is fatal).

I've got a programme called Restorer Pro 2000 (http://www.bitmart.net/). Download and install the demo, this can then search the hard drive and will give you an idea if you can recover what's on it. It's only $50 and works better than anything else I could find - I often use it on dodgy camera memory cards.

HTH,
Rob

PS alternative is to hand it over to some pirate that will charge stupid money to extract the data.

[Adrian Kelland]

Might be worth opening up the box and directly connecting the disk to a PC rather than going though the extra interfaces.

I'd open up the 1Tb Lacie box I have here, but it is not mine I suspect it has 2x500Gb disks - it is big enough. It is bloody noisy too.

Adrian

[Cussy]

Originally Posted by GLOC

Also, I am seriously thinking of getting some duplicate backup so that this thing doesn't happen again. RAID? What sort of costs would I be looking at for a pair 1Tb drives that I can mirror everything across? I am thinking of moving into the picture library side of business and I want to make sure that everything I have is covered.

Raid is dead cheap, you can buy all the bits yourself from somewhere like Scan. When you are talking TB it's cheaper than tape by a mile.

Word of warning though on backup. I read a story about some IT guy that was obsessed with backup, had back-ups of back-ups. I'm pretty sure he was at an observatory outside Sydney (might have that wrong though). Story went along the lines of; nicely backed up data, huge forest fire, no backup at all!!! The moral of the story is if it's worth it, store 2 backups on different sites - just in case.
Rob

[Adrian Kelland]

Originally Posted by Cussy

Raid is dead cheap, you can buy all the bits yourself from somewhere like Scan. When you are talking TB it's cheaper than tape by a mile.

Word of warning though on backup. I read a story about some IT guy that was obsessed with backup, had back-ups of back-ups. I'm pretty sure he was at an observatory outside Sydney (might have that wrong though). Story went along the lines of; nicely backed up data, huge forest fire, no backup at all!!! The moral of the story is if it's worth it, store 2 backups on different sites - just in case.
Rob

Yep, take the work backup home, take the home backup to work.

We are just going over to offsite backup over the wires too. Although disaster recovery using that might be a tad slow...

Adrian

[David G]

Originally Posted by GLOC

Okay, I have an external La Cie harddrive with a load of backups on it (fortunately I also have another harddrive with a duplicate set of the important photos I have).

The drive is detected by XP MCE, shows up as a drive in Explorer, trips 'Autoplay' but when I select the drive in Explorer it comes back with the error Unreadable or corrupted drive and cannot read data.

The drive is USB and Firewire and both come up with the same error.

What are the options?

Also, I am seriously thinking of getting some duplicate backup so that this thing doesn't happen again. RAID? What sort of costs would I be looking at for a pair 1Tb drives that I can mirror everything across? I am thinking of moving into the picture library side of business and I want to make sure that everything I have is covered.

We have just had a run of these Lacie drives giving us trouble.

We use Lacie 2TB Big Disks and a problem similar to the one you described has, on two ocassions now, been the external Power Supply Unit. Not what we suspected due to the 'partial' working.........
Is it still under warranty?
Go to LaCie - External Hard Drives, Network Hard Drives, RAID, Monitors, DVD, Blu-ray and submit a service ticket.....................

We also have some Lacie ethernet disks and in the last month 3 at various customer sites have failed completely.
We are now looking at using Buffalo..................3 yr warranty amongst other things.

HTH

David.

[GLOC]

Thanks Guys.

I will see what I can find re: recovery software as I have EasyRecovery Pro. Just run it now on the basic drive diagnostics and it shows no physical damage, now going through the through examination.

Regarding the info on RAID, I think that dual 1Tb should do me, and it is relatively easy (I would have thought) to add extra drives.

Losing everything in a fire is a big downer which I hope would never happen and I will do something to address that one. Adrian, what are the costs to do remote backup? I don't think the guys would be too chuffed (from a security point of view) of having spare drives just kicking around!!

Thanks.

[dry suit diver]

maplin are doing 750Gb external drives for £120 could they be butchered, sorry altered to suit.