Recovering Data from a failed MAXTOR 'Shared storage II' external storage

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BlueToothKiwi

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Ultimate Geek

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#16156 27-Sep-2007 11:44

OK - I am hoping someone can help me on this - I know a few people who has the same Maxtor external storage as me in this forum.

I have a 1 TB MAXTOR 'Shared storage II' external storage, As far as I can remember, I am 99% sure I set it up as RAID 1 (Two 500GB drives mirrored).

It worked fine until last week. But after a power failure, both hard drives inside the Maxtor failed at the same time. Thanks to Murphy's law, my USB based secondary backup also has been down for a week or two leaving me with lost data.

The Maxtor was under warranty - and the supplier would be happy to replace the drive under warranty. However, they quoted me over $4,000 for data recovery (with no guarantee of recovery).

So I have taken on the task of trying to do this myself. The Seagate helpdesk person suggested I set up a Linux machine and mount the two hard drives and try the recovery - but won’t give me any more help on how to actually do it.

I need to recover about 20GB worth of rare videos and stuff from the failed drive. Does anyone know how to?

Tim

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

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140 posts

Master Geek

#88291 27-Sep-2007 11:52

First of all, is it formatted as an NTFS or FAT32 drive?

I have personally used GetDataBack (both the NTFS and FAT flavours) many times to help myself and others retrieve data. It has served me well for this purpose. Have a look at their tools, they are inexpensive relative to the $4,000 you were quoted!

www.runtime.org

nairda

140 posts

Master Geek

#88294 27-Sep-2007 12:00

Having had a look at the datasheet specifications it looks like it contains a SATA II drive so you'll probably need a USB SATA II enclosure to plug the hard drive from your NAS to your PC running your recovery software.

HTH

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
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Geekzone

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#88295 27-Sep-2007 12:00

Obviously by opening the unit to use the drives you will be voiding your warranty so add the unit cost to the cheaper software recovery.

Now that this is out of the way, how do you know both units are dead? Perhaps it's the unit's controller? In which case simply removing the drives and plugging to a PC would get your data back - so don't get software for this, just yet.

I personally had two Maxtor 1TB OneTouch replaced. I am on my third unit now, and it seems ok. I never used RAID 1, because I read more than one report of data loss when using RAID 1, so why worry about doing mirroring on this unit? I have a second 500GB units which my Windows Home Server uses to mirror select folders. This is a great feature of WHS.

BlueToothKiwi

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#88298 27-Sep-2007 12:21

Thanks Mauricio and Nairda for the reply.

freitasm: Obviously by opening the unit to use the drives you will be voiding your warranty so add the unit cost to the cheaper software recovery. ...

Now that this is out of the way, how do you know both units are dead?

The supplier had kindly opened it up with Seagate's permission to verify that it is definitely faulty (i.e. BOTH disks within the MAXTOR has failed) without impacting the warranty. I got both the faulty drives x2 as well as the brand new MAXTOR box as a warranty replacement. So I am free to do what ever I please. And given I only have two months left on warranty, I might even plug the faulty drives into the new MAXTOR (thus breaking its warranty) - so I can verify that the supplier's diagnostics are correct and eliminate that it is not the controller that is faulty (the unit used to make a crunching noise - which is why I suspected the physical drives.

Looking back - I probably should have left it as Mirror 0.

But given it is striped, how do I get the data out - it surely wont be as simple as plugging bot drives into a desktop?

I was going to buy a SATA2 controller first (my desktop does not have one) and install Linux and try my luck - but given I never played with Linux in my life, I am scared to go down the path.

Tim

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

nairda

140 posts

Master Geek

#88312 27-Sep-2007 14:14

Sorry I don't understand. You mentioned in your first post that they were mirrored? That is what RAID level 1 is - mirrored. RAID level 0 is striped, unless I am mistaken.

If it is mirrored, then it should be a lot easier to recover the data.

BlueToothKiwi

282 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#88315 27-Sep-2007 14:28

Nairda,

I said 'I am 99% sure I set it up as RAID 1'.

The problem is I am not really sure - I set it up 11 weeks ago. Is there any way to find out if it is RAID 0 or RAID 1, given that I cant access the drives using the Maxtor One Touch interface.

Tim

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

nairda

140 posts

Master Geek

#88318 27-Sep-2007 14:43

If you have two 500GB disks and your RAID has a total capacity of 1TB, then it is RAID 0. If your two disk RAID has a total capacity of 500GB, then it is RAID 1.

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BlueToothKiwi

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#88321 27-Sep-2007 15:20

And how do you propose I determine the capacity of two dead drives that dont work?

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#88325 27-Sep-2007 15:49

please define "dead"

does your BIOS or OS detect the disks?
or does the filesystem not mount?

SpinRite from grc.com works incredibly well, it's worth a try.
Getdataback does not support Linux filesystems and will only work in the case of Windows filesystem's corruption.

boot your Linux machine with the disk attached and paste /var/log/dmesg here that can tell us if the disk or the filesystem is broken.

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

BlueToothKiwi

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#88333 27-Sep-2007 16:29

Dead = Drive makes a crunching noice (much louder than normal). At the moment it is housed inside the Maxtor box which supposedly have Linux. When I try to access the IP address of the web interface to manage it, I see the networklight come on the Maxtor box - but the Web Browser times out with nothing coming back.

So I have given up recovering the data in Situ while the drives are mounted in the original Maxtor controller.

I am about to set up a machine with Linux and mount the drive on to it. Which version of Linux would you reccomend.?

I will checkout the software you reccoemended. Not lookng forward to installing Linux :(

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#88338 27-Sep-2007 16:40

oh the clicking sound

SpinRite may be able to help, it's helped me recover a disk that emitted the horrible clicking before and I highly reccomend it.

Ubuntu Linux is by far the easiest to install and use but, may be of little use until spinrite has remedied the disk.

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

nairda

140 posts

Master Geek

#88341 27-Sep-2007 16:43

BlueToothKiwi: And how do you propose I determine the capacity of two dead drives that dont work?

You don't remember what capacity it had before it failed? From what I read it defaults to RAID 0 so if you changed it you would have changed it to RAID 1. I don't have one of these drives so I am not best placed to comment.

In the event you cannot remember and you cannot access MAXTOR's web interface without having your drives attached to see what your settings are, barf's suggestion of using SpinRite might be the best option. According to their website's FAQ, there seems to be some provision for recovering from RAID configurations with SpinRite validating the type of RAID configuration it is from the partition table.

NB: if you use SpinRite, you do not need to install Linux

NB 2: Apparently they give you a 30 day money-back guarantee

Presto

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Wannabe Geek
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#88584 28-Sep-2007 21:42

You can try with Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software. It helped me to retrieve my data which I lost due to software malfunction. Stellar Phoenix works for both FAT & NTFS file system, recovering the data from formatted hard drive or data lost due to software malfunction, viruses, file/directory deletion or even sabotage.

Download the demo version from:http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
Demo shows the preview of the recovered data.

BlueToothKiwi

282 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#88604 29-Sep-2007 05:24

Thank yo Nairda, Presto and Barf,

I will start the process this weekend and keep you all up to date.

Tim

Tim M, Auckland
Blog: http://paddler.co.nz

Addammer

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#89095 2-Oct-2007 14:41

I'm not trying to Hijack your thread. Maybe my question will help.

I have a Maxtor OneTouch Turbo III it was striped RAID 0

2x500gb

My Computer will not recognize it at all now. All of the sudden. I have tried plugging it into 3 other computers all running XP and in non of the machines will it "recognize" anything has been plugged in. No "duh-ding". Blinking white light on the front of the Maxtor

I have taken it apart as much as I can. I'm scared that I'm going to blow away the data. I do have a machine here that is configured for Serial ATA. Are there Do's and Don't's with something like this?

Are there some basic first steps in recovering this data??

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