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Hi All,

I just ran into a problem with my Lacie Big Disk 500GB Firewire drive that I hope someone has seen. It contains 2 WD 250GB disks, and when one went south I lost tons of stuff that I really didn't want to lose, but that's a story for another day.

I just received an identical replacement disk, replaced the crashed disk, plugged the baby back into my desktop, and voila, I now have 2 250GB disks in my system, rather than one single 500GB. Stripe lost. Somehow, someway I need to restripe these disks.

I talked with Lacie, but since I opened the enclosure they are unable to help me (it was just over the 1 year warranty anyway). If they had the enclosure they would be able to fix it, but wouldn't give me any idea how to restripe this sucker.

With that said, does anyone have any suggestions that might allow me to restripe these disks? I have cleared the MBR of each disk, but to no avail. Any thoughts or suggestions to help me resolve this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Alex

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Dani AI

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A brief expert note: LaCie Big Disk enclosures from that era commonly implement the stripe (RAID-0) inside the enclosure controller. The controller keeps the striping map, so when drives are removed and connected directly to a host they will show up as two separate 250GB disks. That behavior explains 's observation that clearing the MBR did not recreate a single 500GB volume. As mentioned, tools like DiskWarrior can fix partitions and filesystem damage on a single logical disk, but they will not rebuild a controller-managed stripe.

Practical options and a safe workflow:

  1. Refit both drives into the original LaCie enclosure (or swap in an identical model/controller board). If the controller is intact it is the simplest, lowest-risk way to restore the array.
  2. If the enclosure/controller is dead, sourcing an identical enclosure/controller is usually safer than manual reconstruction.
  3. Last-resort forensic approach: create sector-by-sector images of both drives first and work only on copies. Determine disk order and chunk/stripe size by inspecting alignment and sample sectors. If those parameters are known, a RAID-0 can be re-created on images using Linux mdadm with the exact chunk size and --assume-clean so data is not zeroed (example placeholder): mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 --chunk=64 /dev/sda /dev/sdb --assume-clean.

Caution: RAID-0 has no redundancy. If one drive truly failed, full reconstruction may be impossible. Imaging before any write operation is mandatory; for critical data, professional data-recovery services are recommended.

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Member Avatar for Dani

I have the exact same LaCie drive connected to my mac. I was able to use DiskWarrior to repartition and reformat it about a year or two ago.

Member Avatar for alexbohner

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be that simple. Somehow the Lacie disk controller is presenting the disks as individual 250GB disks to the OS, rather than a single, 500GB striped volume. I can repartition each disk separately, but this only further divides the 250GB, rather than combining.

My gut tells me there must be a method to tell the controller to intiate the stripe, I just don't know enough about it.

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