LaCie RAIDs suddenly showing up as empty drives

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LaCie RAIDs suddenly showing up as empty drives

My two LaCie thunderbolt RAIDs (10TB and 6TB) have abruptly stopped showing up on the desktop and are instead appearing as their individual drive sections, each labelled "My Book" and containing NO data whatsoever. I've tried zapping the PRAM, updating to 10.9.2, repairing in Disk Utility, etc with no luck. I installed the LaCie RAID Monitor and it says one drive in the 10TB has failed; this explains why only 4 of the 5 drives are showing up. However, it doesn't explain why the 6TB RAID is also acting this way (it shows up as 2 3TB drives; the 10TB shows up as 4 2TB drives).

Anybody seen this before? Why are the drives all called "My Book," which is a Western Digital brand (LaCIe is Seagate IIRC)? Am I completely hosed for data recovery? The drives held the dailies of my new feature film! Help!

thank you kindly in advance,
_Randy

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Mar 1, 2014 9:03 PM

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Answer 1

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PlotinusVeritas

Level 6

14,872 points

Mar 1, 2014 9:30 PM in response to Armak

Armak wrote:

each labelled "My Book" and containing NO data whatsoever

All you metadata is lost, and youre in a bad spot. 😟

you need to read all about that here (link below), you have WD control software on your Mac, REGARDLESS of you using Lacie (ie Seagate)

western digital softeware is to blame, and WD took responsibility for it months ago (see WD board all about this)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?start=255&tstart=0

Am I completely hosed for data recovery?

Data recovery is possible, however all metadata is lost to be sure.

which is almost as bad as all data being lost.

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Answer 2

Armak Author

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Mar 1, 2014 11:45 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

I haven't used a WD drive in 5 years and this laptop's only 6 months old so I'm not sure how I could have gotten any WD software on it. Searches in the hard drive for "western" "wd" "western digital" "smartware" and "mybook" get zero hits. Is it possibly in a hidden directory or some such? I want to exorcise my machine ASAP!

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Answer 3

Mar 1, 2014 11:56 PM in response to Armak

Armak wrote:
Searches in the hard drive for "western" "wd" "western digital" "smartware" and "mybook" get zero hits.

thats normal, its there, run this to find them:

use this FREE little test APP to verify (most people here use it for diagnostics)

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. EtreCheck automatically removes any personally identifiable information from the output.

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Answer 4

Armak Author

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Mar 2, 2014 10:20 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas

Sonuvabitch, you're right! EtreCheck found WD files that Search didn't. They must've been moved over by Migration Assistant when my Mac was new. Such a pointless waste!!

Now for the heavy question— is there a way to recover the contents of my drives? Can you recommend a workflow, tutorial, or (shudder) data recovery specialist?

thanx again,

_R

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Answer 5

Mar 2, 2014 10:48 AM in response to Armak

Armak wrote:

Sonuvabitch, you're right! EtreCheck found WD files that Search didn't.

Taa- daaa

the creator of that software is here on the board, he certainly made a helpful piece of diagnostics utility.

As far as recovery, see the link (last 15 pages anyway) on successful software used, such as Disk Warrior

here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?start=255&tstart=0

Bad news, as mentioned is that your metadata with near 100% certainty is lost, and thats, well, its bad. 😟

This is why data redundancy is just so so extremely important.

This is the one part in life where professionals will actually tell you that genuine paranoia (about redundant data copies) is a good idea.

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Answer 6

Armak Author

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Mar 2, 2014 2:09 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

The only reason I'm not at defcon-1 level mental meltdown is that I backed up the data 6x before beginning to work on it.

The metadata loss bites but I kept the drives well-organized so as long as the directory structure is intact, I ought to be able to re-create it. Not that I've ever had to do such a thing before on 16TB of data. Guess I know how I'll be spending March.

Thanks for all the help!

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Answer 7

Mar 2, 2014 2:19 PM in response to Armak

Armak wrote:

I backed up the data 6x before beginning to work on it.

Youre one in a million then, nobody else does that (or even close to it) but they should 😁

Same reason Ive got nearly 120 hard drives.

I dont know if you still use HD control software at all, but if you do, WD or otherwise, trash it, can it, dump it.

No good has ever come out of the use of HD control software.

NAS and certain RAID require software for their operations of course, but as meant in general.

Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection

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Answer 8

Apr 2, 2014 10:42 PM in response to Armak

So I am running OS Maverick 10.9.2

Recently I mounted up my brothers WD My Book Hard-drive just to load some files onto my computer. Since ejecting the HDD I re-connected my Lacie Rugged 1TB hard-drive but it is mounting as the WD My Book.

Disk Utility is recognising my Lacie Hard-drive but under it is showing the My Book as part of the mount.

I hope i'm not sounding like a complete retard but I can't afford to lose over 700gb worth of photos from recent events that I desperately need.

Surely it can't be my Lacie Hard-drive which has corrupted, it must be the OS reading something wrong from somewhere?

I'm sorry if this question has been raised but I just need an answer!

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