[Bug-ddrescue] Advice on rescuing LaCie Big Disk (this is not a bug report nor contribution, respond only if willing)

[Manca Weeks]

Hi,

first and foremost - THANK YOU - for creating ddrescue. Me and many 
of my customers are eternally indebted to you.
Let me know if there is a way for us to donate funds to the project.

I have a LaCie Big Disk with one drive working (I believe the RAID 
scheme is striped and hardware based). I will try to swap the drive 
board (don't know the proper handle -the chip that interfaces between 
the drive hardware and the ATA interface) from the working drive to 
the non-working drive after I have made an image of the one that 
works since the drives are identical.
It sounds (from my other drive rescuing experiences) like a drive 
with a power issue, not a mechanical problem. So I hope switching the 
board will allow me to grab the data from the other drive without too 
much trouble.

I have successfully recovered many drives using ddrescue before, but 
all were on single drives, so the process was quite simple. I operate 
mainly in the GUI of OS X so I am only familiar with basic unix 
concepts and commands.

I have another suitable healthy drive I may be able to use to attach 
to the BigDIsk hardware in place of the damaged one, but I am 
uncertain about how to properly duplicate the RAIDed data to the 
replacement drive. The model is only slightly different and the 
manufacturing date is merely months apart, same size. I would like to 
figure out a way to fool the RAID hardware to not notice the drive 
swap.

Right now I am imaging the Apple HFS part of the healthy drive in the 
RAID, I am uncertain where the RAID data is kept - I assume within 
the HFS partition, but I realize I could be completely wrong.

If you are willing to help, please respond and I will provide 
whatever additional details you need to help me figure this out.

If there is an existing thread, forum or any other resource detailing 
a case like this, please direct me to it. This is a bit deeper than 
my usual web searches, so I am not at home finding the information.

I am eternally grateful for ddrescue as is and will not be offended 
if you have better things to do than help a newbie.

Thanks for your hard work.

Manca Weeks

http://overnightmac.com
888-308-9603