URGENT: Need intact data from two external SATA drives RAID ZERO

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What a nightmare ! My neighbor died from esophageal cancer and the funeral is in one week. He left behind a G5 2.5 DP tower with a dead motherboard, and he put the two 640 GB SATA drives in an Other World Computing external enclosure (Mercury Elite Pro Dual) weeks before he expired. He was NEVER able to achieve access to these drives in this enclosure. (External RAIDs are a no-no).

His grieving wife wants pictures extracted from the drives. There is no known back up and the G5 tower cannot be found.

When connecting the external enclosure by FW800 or USB3, the need to format flag pops up. Disk Utility shows one 1400 GB drive "unformatted". The DIP switches on the enclosure are set to RAID 0. Several data recovery programs find files, but of course any jpg over 50kb looks like venetian blinds, Tried Data Rescue 3, and the drive depicted as 1280 GB does not divide so that a RAID SET for emulation cannot be formed. See here: http://www.prosofteng.com/blog/reco...using-data-rescue-3-by-prosoft-engineering-2/
Tested each drive separately and briefly using a converter and each drive seems intact
What to do now to recover jpg's intact and ASAP ?

1. Try another enclosure ?
2. Insert these drives into my personal G5 tower ? Will these drives work or is RAID very ROM version dependent ?
3. Try different data recovery software ?
4. Which software other than Data Rescue will recover from two drives in one external enclosure believed to be RAID ZERO ?
 
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chscag

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I would go ahead and try 1 and 2. It may be possible to extract data from the drive(s) that way. If that doesn't work, you'll need to send the drives to a data recovery specialist which can be very expensive. If it comes to that, advise the widow that data recovery can take weeks and may cost as much as $1000.00.
 
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Thank you for the reply. Few more questions.

I would go ahead and try 1 and 2. It may be possible to extract data from the drive(s) that way. If that doesn't work, you'll need to send the drives to a data recovery specialist which can be very expensive. If it comes to that, advise the widow that data recovery can take weeks and may cost as much as $1000.00.


Thank you.

1. If using a new/different enclosure, if the drives are reversed, and only a laptop with data recovery software is used, is there a significant risk of data loss as a consequence of the drive order ?

2. Same question, but if the drives are placed in a different G5 tower ?

3. What would a data recovery outfit do which a customer cannot, if these drives are operating properly and there's no corruption and they are in the proper order ?

4. How best to place them internally in the G5 ? No one knows what card was used in the original G5 and in which order were the drives.

5. Must the bootable system software be on one of these two drives ?

BTW the quote from a data recovery place was $1,000 to $14,000. So I'd like to give this a good effort, but not cause any harm.
 
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I would also look at cloning each drive, with volume ownership disabled for clones.
Might just give the access ...
 
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So far, no success

I would also look at cloning each drive, with volume ownership disabled for clones.
Might just give the access ...



Thanks. I have access to each drive via Data Rescue, and files are found in each drive. Only interested in jog's. JPGs > 30kb are striped or venetian blinded, typical of RAID 0.

What good is cloning each drive if they each have only half the information ?

I put the drives in my known good working G5 and in both drive orders, the G5 would not boot.

Worth trying another G5 ?

Worth trying a different enclosure ?

KNOLL indicates that their Mac software can access the drives in separate enclosures and synthesize/combine the drives as if they were internal. Ontrack Online Shop

Too many unknown parameters to guess if default doesn't work.
 

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