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Lacie NAS Disk Repair

LACIE MINIMUS

After using Buffalo for a long time, I decided that I would like to try a different hard drive. I chose the Lacie option, buying two different hard drives. Externally, they appear tough and hard-wearing, which is really what I need in an external drive. However, since that purchase about a year ago, I have had almost continual problems with it. I have hardly used them because they are such a struggle to manipulate. Firstly, I had to actually format the drives before I could use them, which is absurd in this day and age. One of them now does not work at all, and cannot be recognised by the computer. However, the other is constantly telling me that it needs to be formatted, even though I did this when both of them arrived. When I look at Properties, there is no visible data, even though I used this as my second back-up when it first arrived. Where has the data gone, and why are neither of them working as they should? Can you help me to recover both of the drives, or at least one as I need the data off them as I am a school teacher and the contents contain 5 years work.

LACIE MINIMUS

I am having a number of problems with a Lacie Minimus version 2 external hard drive. Firstly, this drive is very difficult to power, as the cable needs to be sat at a certain angle before the device will work. I often spend about 5 minutes moving the cable in and out of the port, and then from side to side, before it will respond. I wanted to use the drive to connect with Time Machine, and this seems to work ok, with all the data being visible but I cannot copy the data onto my computer, but it is making a lot of noise. There seems to be some kind of constant whirring noise which often is louder than any video games or other devices that I am using.

Lacie NAS Disk Repair

Lacie have are the manufacturers of Network Attached Storage devices as well as RAID and hard drives on an individual level. They also supply NAS devices diskless so that the user or network administrator can determine the level of volume contained therein.

These devices and drives come in a variety of sizes ranging from 500GB up to 1TB enabling even the most tech savvy individual at home to accommodate their storage needs.

As with all drives and devices in the NAS category there are problems with the Lacie setups as well. Indeed it you would be hard pressed to find any hard disk drive or Network Attached Storage device that didn’t at some point in its working life encounter some kind of problem or error.

There are a great many Lacie products available on the market today and amongst them all they seem to share the same problems, almost on a generic level if you will, that are encountered both in their hard disks internally and their external USB and Firewire products.

For the most part these problems seem to centre on the host computer’s inability to recognize the drives that have been attached to it via Lacie NAS devices. This can sometimes be due to problems with firmware or indeed the setup with disk management but the general consensus among users seems to simply problems with the drives themselves.

Common problems listed on the Internet include problems with malfunctioning USB ports but it should be said that these are, although common, not the problems that cause the biggest concern. Indeed a faulty USB cabling setup is easily replaced and will have no bearing on the information integrity within the drive or the array.

Many of the arrays used display errors relating to unknown partitions or drive which exhibit zero bytes as storage. Simply put the drives are recognized by the disk management system but when it comes down to an accurate count of the storage used none can be obtained.

Event viewer listings also show that the chkdsk test has been run and the disks are in what is known as a ‘raw’ state; this means that in the computer perceives the hard drive to be unformatted and unused and therefore no information or data saved therein can be accessed.

The temptation for many people would be to carry out a simple reformatting of the disk or disks in the array. And whilst this may work with regards to making the disk active again – it may only work for a short time if there is a physical problem with the drive or drives in question. One should also consider the problem of Raid mirroring whereby one drive will report the same errors as another even though it is not faulty. Formatting the drive or drives whilst a useful idea, can take a problem of some annoyance and amplify it especially if the information you need is lost in the reformatting process.

Also you may find from the Internet that there are suggestions of simply taking old or non functioning hard drives from the Lacie arrays and replacing them with new; this is all well and good but still leaves you with the problem of information locked on a disk that cannot be accessed by conventional means.

This is where www.plymouthdatarecovery.co.uk comes in and with specialist knowledge that can help you recover lost or certainly inaccessible data.