Articles

Data Recovery Articles

LaCie Big Disk Recovery

LaCie are well known for their external hard drives. A lot of small businesses use Lacie NAS systems to backup their data. In our experience a lot of Photographers, Video Production Houses, Solicitors, Architects etc use Lacie Big Disks for their business data storage solution. The LaCie Big Disk series are the perfect example of how external hard disks have grown in storage capacity without having grown in physical size. They offer between 1 and 4TB of data storage for all types of computer system and they can be used as a standalone system or they can be used in multiples to provide effective network attached storage solutions.

The LaCie Big Disk combines a number of standard IDE or SATA drives within a single housing that are concatenated in order to provide you with a device that appears to be a single storage drive. Lacie Big Disks can be setup in Raid 0, Raid 1 and Raid 5 configuration. Most Lacie Big Disks we receive in for recovery are in Raid 0 configuration. This means the data is striped across all disks with no redundancy. This means if a disk fails inside the Lacie enclosure then the data will not be accessable. If your Lacie system fails please contact us for a quote. We have 14 yeasr experience working with Lacie systems.

While LaCie drives are highly flexible in their usage you should note that LaCie drives are based on Linux, so therefore recovery of data can be more problematic because the file system that is used on the drives is in the form of XFS, which cannot be directly accessed using either Mac or Windows operating systems. Instead you will either require speciality tools or the assistance of professional data recovery engineers like ourselves.

The SATA or IDE drives that are used within the LaCie disk, because they are standard, are susceptible to the various types of failure that any standard internal SATA drive is susceptible to. They can also be susceptible to more types of physical damage due to the fact that the drives are portable and do not necessarily have the same stability that a drive has within a computer system.

In addition to the issues mentioned above, the use of LaCie drives is often in arrays so there will be the complications of ascertaining where the specific drive sits in relation to the rest of the array and so the amount of data that sits on that drive can also be assessed. There are a number of other parameters that are also required in order to successfully carry out data recovery on a LaCie Big Disk.

If you have a failure of your LaCie disk then you would be wise to give us a call straight away in order to discuss your failure with one of our LaCie experts who will be able to provide you with a diagnosis of your problem and also can outline what will need to happen in order to recover the data from it. As has been outlined above this is not an easy process and so unless you are confident in your computer skills you should hand over the task to our experts who are able to use their extensive experience and knowledge to safely recover your data from your LaCie BiG Disk.

RAID Rebuild Corruption

One of the major benefits of RAID 5 arrays is that it is possible to recreate the data that is lost when single disks within the array fail. While in theory this all looks nice and easy and that all that is required when a raid drive fails is to plug in a new one and wait for the data to recreate itself, in practice it takes a much greater understanding of the system in order to be able to carry out a successful RAID rebuild.

There are two main types of failure that can happen within a RAID system. One is a physical drive failure that only affects a single drive and allows the utilisation of a replacement drive. In contrast to this, a logical corruption cannot be sorted out by replacing a drive within the disk array. In the event of a physical failure there are two ways in which the data from the damaged drive can be replaced.

The first of these is in pre-failure replacement. A RAID array is set up to monitor a number of parameters that can indicate when a drive will shortly fail and so the drive is then highlighted as requiring a replacement. If another drive is available immediately this can be used to copy the data from the failing drive before it fails and while it is doing this it will also become the active drive so any new data will be written to the replacement drive rather than the failing drive.

If the failing drive breaks before the above can be carried out then post-failure replacement will take place. In this case the data on the failed drive is lost and must be rebuilt from the existing parity data that is stored on the rest of the drives within the array. This is not a simple swap as there are many calculations that have to be carried out in order to successfully rebuild the data so that it is usable. If these calculations are wrong then the rebuilt data will be corrupt and will not be accessible.

It is not only incorrect calculations that can lead to corruption of the rebuilt drive. If an inappropriate disk is used to replace the drive that has failed then not only will the data on the failed disk be corrupted, any recently written data will also be affected as the redundancy in the array is restored by the system. This type of corruption may not be immediately noticeable as you are likely to find that come files appear to be unaffected and will open normally. If you find later that your files are not opening properly your system will already be corrupted and your data is likely to have been permanently lost.

So if you are attempting to carry out a RAID rebuild consult our RAID recovery engineers who will be able to advise you on the best practice for recovering the data from your failed drive without corrupting it. Our advice would be to image all disks before you attempt a rebuild, that way you are safe guarding your data if the rebuild does not complete successfully. If this is not possible, and you maybe have already completed a rebuild that has failed then contact us for advice and a fee no obligation quote. We will use our 14 years of knowledge and experience to provide a quote and timescale for a professional recovery of your data.

Seagate 720011 Firmware

If you have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, do not despair, the drives are generally highly reliable but there has been a firmware issue that has been identified that is present in a number of these drives. The fault is only present in a very small number of models, so if you have one of these drives the first thing that you should do is to check the model number against the list of known affected models. The fault itself may cause a loss of data access after powering the drive off and then on again.

If your drive is not one of the serial numbers affected then you can continue using your drive as normal. If your drive is affected then you should backup your data ASAP as there is a high probability that the hard drive will fail without warning. We receive a large number of these drives in for recovery due to the firmware failure. If your Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive has failed contact us to determine why it has failed, we can normally diagnose over the phone.

This is only one possible reason why your Seagate 7200.11 hard disk might fail. Seagate 7200.11 hard disks have also been fitted to Seagate External hard drives and so some Seagate External drives are also susceptible to this failure as well. There may be other physical reasons why a Seagate 7200.11 hard drive might fail that can include the system overheating if it is located incorrectly, or perhaps through an impact if the drive is being relocated and is dropped on the way.

There can also be software issues with hard drives, such as corruption of the operating system not allowing the drive to be mounted or recognised by the system, or there can be errors introduced into the file management system that can lead to inaccessible data.

File accessibility can also be easily damaged through user error. These errors can be as simple as accidentally deleting a single file, or it can involve a significant file deletion that could be through the formatting of a drive by mistake. In these cases the pointers to the files will be stripped out of the system, although the files themselves can remain intact while they are waiting to be overwritten by newer data. There can also be other file accessibility issues that are caused by manipulation of the operating system or the file management system.

If you are unlucky enough to have had your Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive fail then you should give one of our Seagate data recovery experts a call in order to discuss your disk issues. Not only can we provide a diagnosis of the problems that your drive is having over the phone by using our years of experience and knowledge, we can also help to advise you on the best course of action for you to take in order for you to get the maximum amount of data recovery possible for the type of fault. We can offer a highly competitive quote, but note that we do not skimp on the quality of service that we offer as we always create images of your original disk so that even in the event of a failure we will not damage your original disk in any way.

Why Choose Us?