Recovering from Working RAID 0 Drives without RAID Controller

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I had a Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB drive (4x 250GB IDE, RAID 0). I stopped using the drive several years ago, having upgraded to more modern drives. I dismantled the enclosure and kept the drives, placing them in storage and not knowing what to do with them. They have not been formatted or used in any way, as far as I can recall.

I recently had my primary external drive stolen, which unfortunately contained data not backed up anywhere. There is a chance that a portion of the missing data was once stored on the Lacie drive. That being a possibility, I would like to attempt recovery. However, I no longer have the original Lacie controller and do not currently have a replacement controller. Nor do I have enough IDE connections to run all four drives from the same machine at the same time.

Aside from sending the drives to a professional recovery service, what are my options?

Is it possible to perform a bitwise clone of each drive and reassemble the RAID configuration virtually? Is there a compatible RAID controller which I can purchase and use with these drives? Should I resort to purchasing another Lacie BDE and swapping the drives? Am I better off purchasing enclosures to connect the remaining drives to the same computer and attempting recovery that way?
 
According to a support representative at D2 Recovery, "You would need the original LaCie controller to access the drives. Locating another Bigger Disk Extreme casing might work but if the firmware was different from your specific drive, it may not work." This sounds reasonable. Though, I would want to verify as many possible or impossible options as I can before attempting recovery. Does anyone have much experience doing this?
 
I perform NAS device data recovery quite often. And I'm not sure about older Lacie's like yours but the newer Lacie NAS devices I have worked on use Linux Software RAID and do not make use of a hardware RAID controller. If you were to attach the four drives to a desktop computer and boot up from a Linux Live Boot CD there's a chance it may detect the drives as RAID members and automatically reassemble your RAID0 array.

But first it's always a good idea to take clone images of each drive first as a safety net in case something goes wrong.

If the automatic RAID0 reassemble does not work post back as there are other ways to recover your data without the need of another similar Lacie enclosure.
 


Thank you for the response. I will take your advice and try with the Live Boot CD approach. Just so I have additional options to think about in the meantime, what are some of the other ways you mentioned?
 
There's commercial software you can purchase. But you need to know / guess the RAID config parameters. In your case the Linux boot CD method is the thing to try first as it should detect the config automatically.
 


Not as of this time. I might have, had I realized that the one tower to which I have access does not have IDE connections. If I have each drive in a separate external enclosure and connected via USB, is the Linux Live Boot approach still viable? Would it recognize the four drives and be able to reassemble the RAID configuration?