A friend has a Maxtor 2 tb external drive that failed. I had him take it apart. I was expecting a single drive which he could try using as an internal and go from there. It is actually 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB drives in a daisy chain. Any suggestions as to where to go from here?
Hi Mez .. I would guess they are running as a software virtual partition.. most likely UFS .. I would start by trying a raw sector dump (spinrite mayde.. it could be just one of the drives has failed) on the top one just to see if any data recovery software can see into the partial remaining filetables. Not fun at all.. I can't think of anything else to do.. this kind of hardware that is coming out now seems to have been designed by complete retards. pp
I was figuring worse case senerio buying a second Frankinstein and swapping out drives hoping that both drives are good. The data is faily valuable but not that valuable. They were full of small files. If he plugs the drive in as an internal won't windows re-write the boot sector?
It could very well be that only one drive has failed. For some reason these come setup to mirror one another and one hard drive may fail and cause both not to work, when in fact one hard drive is still usuable. I have a USB to SATA/IDE cable that I test all my hard drives on (best $14 I ever spent). This just basically sets up each drive as external hard drive for testing purposes. If they work, I simply buy another external case. Might be worth it for you to get one of those or even a single enclosure to test it out.
I have a bit more info. There were 2 LEDs that with alternatly flash. Only one flashed after the problem. As it died there was clicking like the head was thrashing.
