G-Raid disappeared mid-edit - now says 'not intitialized'

[Ben Scott]

Hi All,

Have a 2Tb G-Raid drive connected via Esata to my Windows PC and mid export from Premiere the drive suddenly disappeared from the system and numerous reboots haven't helped. Nor has switching to USB or FW800 on my macbook.

I'm left with this - The GRaid being Disk 4

It turns on absolutely fine and you can hear the drives spinning up properly without any telltale sounds of mechanical issues. One assumes somehow the boot table has gotten corrupted. Question is, how can I a) repair the drive's boot record to get it up and working again and/or b) get my material off that drive? Obviously 'initializing' the drive would result in me losing the material on there so that's not an option.


Any thoughts or advice on how best to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ericyoung]

If it's a G-Raid, that's a Raid 1. Your symptoms indicate a Raid controller failure, as a single drive failure would still be mountable with a error indicator showing a single drive failure.

RAID 1 means the two physical drives are clones. Therefore data is mirrored on each drive.

I would get a technically competent person to crack open the case, , extract the two drives, and either rehouse them in single drive external cases, or put them in an external drive dock, to access the data.

If still in warranty, you could contact G-Tech about recovery of your data, but they would just be doing the same as outlined above, but they would pay for a replacement drive controller repair.

Whatever method you decide, you should backup your important data from whichever of your good drives is recoverable before anything else to minimise any data loss.

 

[Ben Scott]

Thanks Eric. Advice very much appreciated.

 

[dino g]

did u try diskwarrior? usually fixes these types of problems..unless it is hardware related. then i agree contact g-tech first before you crack it open as it will fall out of warrantee.

 

[Ben Scott]

Thanks Dino. Tried PC variants of that sort of thing but will give it a go.

 

[joe hedge]

If it's a G-Raid, that's a Raid 1. Your symptoms indicate a Raid controller failure, as a single drive failure would still be mountable with a error indicator showing a single drive failure.

G-Raids come out of the box as Raid 0. Unless you reconfigured it to Raid 1, it's Raid 0.

Disk Warrior first, and you might need an empty 2 TB drive if DW can't fix the file structure, in which case it re-writes as much of your data as possible to another drive.

 

[Ben Scott]

Thanks Joe. Having checked it out now sadly it's an NTFS formatted disk and DIsk Warrior apparently only looks at HFS ones.

 

[Jean-Claude Benet]

I've got the G-Raid 4TB Thunderbolt drive that just stopped initializing as well. At first I thought it might be a power issue but it no longer shows up Unfortunately this is all too familiar for me. Does anyone here know what kind of drives reside inside this external enclosure specificially? I purchased a warranty along with it, I suppose I'll go down that path before opening it up.

 

[Dave Blackham]

I've got the G-Raid 4TB Thunderbolt drive that just stopped initializing as well. At first I thought it might be a power issue but it no longer shows up Unfortunately this is all too familiar for me. Does anyone here know what kind of drives reside inside this external enclosure specificially? I purchased a warranty along with it, I suppose I'll go down that path before opening it up.

I think G Raid are made by Hitachi and use Hitachi drives.

 

[ericyoung]

G-Raids come out of the box as Raid 0. Unless you reconfigured it to Raid 1, it's Raid 0.

Disk Warrior first, and you might need an empty 2 TB drive if DW can't fix the file structure, in which case it re-writes as much of your data as possible to another drive.

Oops, wrote too fast. My mistake. Joe is right. It's the G-Safe model that is Raid 1. Raid 0 is going to be harder to sort.

It could still be the Raid controller, in which case you should avoid using Disk Warrior until it's been evaluated for disk recovery, as any disk software running on the damaged drive can cause further damage.
You could try Protape in Percy Street, London - they sell G-Techs and apparently offer a free disk recovery evaluation and reasonable charge for recovery if you're not in a hurry. Could be worth it for data that is important and not otherwise backed up elsewhere.

http://www.protape.co.uk/products/Data-Recovery.html

I've not used their recovery service, so this is not an endorsement (although I like them as a drive retailer!)

 

[Ben Scott]

Thanks again Eric. Going to pass the drive to a friend whose large IT department has a data recovery section.

 

[ericyoung]

You should mention to them the type of file formats you have on the drive - it not the more common Office, image type files, but .R3D and ProRes/DNxHD etc.

May or may not be relevant - but could be useful.

 

[Ben Scott]

Quick update.

The drive has spent the week being X-Rayed and then properly looked at by the labs of a data recovery company.

The good news is that the drives are apparently absolutely fine and whatever is one them is okay. They've said the issue stems from the firmware on the g-raid becoming corrupted. So theoretically removing the drives and sticking them in another G-Raid unit should bring them up, and then I could feasibly reinitialise the original G-Raid.

Will update once this process has been undertaken.

 

[ericyoung]

Good to know - thanks for the update :smile: