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This is the second time this has happened. I own a LaCie IDE RAID 0 Enclosure and the RAID went bad. The system gave me a warning that the data could be read from the RAID but that nothing could be written, and to remove the data ASAP. I did that and erased and reinitialized the RAID. System reported it was fine, no issues. I wrote to the RAID again and the system reported the same issue.

So, I removed the drives and tested them individually thinking one must have gone bad. Sure enough, one HDD reported all bad blocks, every single one after the Master Boot Record. I didn't think much about it because of the age of the drives, 5 years old. So, I bought two new drives plugged them in and started up the RAID again. Exactly the same thing happened.

All was fine after initializing the RAID and then the next day after powering on the RAID the exact same issue. The HDD sitting in the same position as the first "bad" HDD reported all bad blocks. Obviously, this is an issue with LaCie's bridge board not with the drives. No utility I have used has been able to bring this HDD back to life.

I thought I would just copy the MBR from the good drive to the new one using a sector editor but am hesitant. Is it possible the firmware on the HDD has been corrupted by the LaCie bridge board?? What else could be the cause of such an issue? How can I fix this drive?

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  • RAID 0 is a very bad idea, and you might have faulty enclosures, especially at five years old.
    – user3463
    Feb 14, 2011 at 6:10

1 Answer 1

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I wrote to the RAID again and the system reported the same issue. So, I removed the drives and tested them individually thinking one must have gone bad. Sure enough, one HDD reported all bad blocks, every single one after the Master Boot Record.

If you're testing RAID 0 drives individually after initializing the RAID 0 array, you're always going to get bad data. RAID 0 takes two drives and makes it logically look like one drive by striping the data across both drives. Essentially, when you write a file to disk, you're writing half the data to each disk - so if you try to get data off of one disk only it's going to tell you the data is corrupted.

That being said, it looks like your enclosure has failed. Your hard drives should be fine, especially if they're new.

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  • I didn't say "bad data", I said "bad blocks". Quite different, even six years later it's quite different.
    – John
    Jan 25, 2017 at 18:04

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