2TB Ethernet Big Disk no boot - it seems dead

[alesss]

Hello,

I've a 2TB (2 x 1 TB) LaCie Ethernet Big Disk and it seemed dead then I got a contact with LaCie assistance they initially suggested me to check the power supply.
I did it and it passed the test since they told me to remove all disks from the original case to be mounted on a Linux machine in order to check them out.

Everything was ok including a disk's check with Drive Genius 3 (OSX) as they suggested me to do.

Now LaCie assistance gave up pointing to send all my disk to a recovery company in France which offered me a big ticket for it. I cannot afford all those money and honestly I can understand them.

I need to recover my data that it seems to be in good state although I have tried to use Runtime RAID Reconstructor on Win7 with no further action when it advised me the partitions were unreadable.

I've seen there is a solution for 1 TB but not for 2 TB
http://lacie.nas-central.org/wiki/Ether ... a_recovery

I don't want to make unnecessary steps and meantime I bought a used but reliable power supply.
Now I could do two things:
1 - I could try to reassemble my old EBD, trying to boot with the "good" power supply, although I don't know the right order of the disks.
2- I could try to assemble the 2 partitions shared onto the two disks following the instructions I read in the article above... but I guess the parameters shouldn't be the same for my 2TB EBD

I need your help and it will be very appreciated
thanks in advance
alex

[Mijzelf]

The instructions for the 1TB EBD should be fine. None of the parameters (except the size of the disk which you use to recognize the right disk) has anything to do with the size of the disk.

Actually I think the raid array will be automatically assembled and mounted if you boot your computer from a recent Ubuntu CD while the disks are connected.

1 - I could try to reassemble my old EBD, trying to boot with the "good" power supply, although I don't know the right order of the disks.

It will boot or not. If not you can switch the disks. The box won't format the disks or something when the order is wrong.

[alesss]

Thanks so much for your quick response!

You are right and linux can boot 3 File System (1st of 8,2 MB, 2nd of 748 MB and 3rd of 132 MB) but I can see the 4th File System listed on devices list window (Ubuntu interface) and, when clicked on. it reports:
Impossible to mount "File System of 2,0 TB"
"Error mounting: mount: /dev/md0: can't read superblock"

Should I go toward my second choice by the way? or it worths a try to reassemble all system again with the "reliable" power supply?

thanks in advance
alex

[Mijzelf]

Should I go toward my second choice by the way? or it worths a try to reassemble all system again with the "reliable" power supply?

It won't hurt. And it is, what? 10 minutes work?

"Error mounting: mount: /dev/md0: can't read superblock"

/dev/md0 is a raid array. So the array is already assembled, but the filesystem is corrupted (or not supported). The Wiki doesn't say which filesystem is used, but the Edmini has an xfs datapartition. I think the EBD will also have that.

What is the nature of the data you need? A program like PhotoRec (available for Ubuntu and Windows, but in case of Windows you can't assemble the array) is capable of recovering insanely many filetypes by recognizing their header, but on an xfs filesystem you'll loose the filenames.
If that is no option, you could also try to run xfs_repair on the md device (maybe you'll need to install xfs_tools or xfs_utils first), but it *can* make things worse. So running a PhotoRec scan first is recommended, as it doesn't touch the partition.

[alesss]

thanks for your suggestions ... I'm going to put them in original EBD case first as soon as I find my skew driver
I have movies and some Objective C source code of my previous job... it would be hard for me to have "no name" files ...it's a huge disk but in case I won't complain by the way.

thanks again
stay in touch
alex

[Mijzelf]

The movies should be no problem (as long as they aren't fragmented on disk), but source code... I have a bad feeling. That is plain text, isn't it? No recognizable header.

[alesss]

yep...I've a lot of them and you know they are all nested: my jobs and they are very important for me!
What's about movies? They would be given back with "no name"?

Ok...it's too early for that... I'll try to put all disks together in the old case.
thanks

[alesss]

thanks for all your suggestion, Mijelf... I'm doing the complete restore of all my files
The power supply was the main problem although it was ok for my tester.
I assembled the old EBD again and after the first attempt with no success I changed the order of disks and magically I saw it on the LAN.

THANKS AGAIN!
alex

[Mijzelf]

You're welcome. I hope you will have a better backup discipline from now on?