hey,

I have this 500 GB external LACIE USB 2.0. Recently it started making these weirds sounds from the AC adaptor. Sounds like a cd-rom drive spinning. From then on it wouldn't recognize it.

I figure the AC adaptor is dead. Is there a way i could recover all of my movies from it?? Inside it has 2 X 250 GB IDE with one set as master.

I tried putting one of them on slave and using another external case.
I tried adding it as secondary slave one IDE as my dvd-rom is set on the Primary channel. When it booted up it said cannot boot from this disk evern thiough I changed the BIOS settings to reflect anything but the new HD. Any help would be appreciated! ;)

Were they in raid? If it is it might be a hard fix. If not try downloading a ubuntu cd and booting from that. From there you can drag all your data into the windows drive.

Thedude2741:

I figure the AC adaptor is dead.

I wouldn't doubt that.  The AC adaptor on my Lacie is a very cheap 12v/2a brick made in China.  The easiest solution, and one that would recover the most value, might be for you to just get another AC adaptor.

Thedude2741:

I tried putting one of them on slave and using another external case.

Did you originally see them as two drives or a RAID array?  All my externals have a single drive, so I'm afraid I've never had to think about this configuration.

Thedude2741:

When it booted up it said cannot boot from this disk evern thiough I changed the BIOS settings to reflect anything but the new HD

So if I understand correctly, your system doesn't have the external drive anywhere in the boot order list - but it's still trying to boot from it? I would check for a newer BIOS for your MB, as that definitely sounds like a bug.

-J

They were oringinally in RAID config as one total drive. Would i have to add them both inside my computer for it to work?

When I added one of the disks I set it as slave on secondary ide channel (dvd-rom is on primary) inside my computer and it recognized it.

BUT it told me It couldnt boot from this disk even though i set my main boot to my real master hard drive. Maybe i can try removing it from the list completely.

Any ideas?

Thanks again for your help

Thedude2741:

They were oringinally in RAID config as one total drive. Would i have to add them both inside my computer for it to work?

That depends:  Were they configured as RAID-0 (striped, 500GB of space) or RAID-1 (mirrored, 250GB of space)?  If they were RAID-0, yes - they would both need to be in system and in a RAID-0 array to be read.

See, with RAID 0, the first fragment of a file may be written to the first drive, and the second fragment of the same file to then second drive, third fragment to the first, 4th to second,... etc. etc.  Without both disks, you only have half of each file.

Try and find a program can recover a raid 0 array off the drives. DO NOT use the drives at all. I can not recommend a program because I have never used any of them, however I'm sure someone here can.

bob_on_the_cob:

DO NOT use the drives at all

Yeah, what he said!  You're probably not in danger, since you haven't been able to mount them... but if you were to write to one of them, the raid array may be completely unrecoverable.

 I put them both inside the case on my secondary ide channel. It still said cannot boot from this disk even though it was set to my main HD. I discovered that it wouldnt detect my other HD of the two from my external. I thinking its dead. As long as I can get one of them to work at least I can reformat it and add it inside my comp.