Help with Comstar 1000GB external hard drive CO-HDE1-1TB

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I have a Comstar external usb hard drive model # CO-HDE1-1TB that I purchased Jan 4 2007 (luck of the draw) and as of yesterday none of my computers will pick it up, it comes on, fan spins up but the computer just doesn't see or indicate that it's connected (no beeps). From what I've read, this external hard drive consists of 2 individual 500GB hard drives in a raid 0 configuration to utilize them both as one drive.

Does anyone know how I can retrieve the data off them. If it were one single drive, I would just pop it into my computer and try from there. I have not had much to do with raid configs and do not want to lose the data on the drive. A lot of it is replaceable but time consuming and I don't have a specific list of what's on it.

Any help or guidance/direction would be appreciated.

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks!

If one or both of the drives has failed, you are pretty much screwed. Possibly a data recovery company could get your data, but it will cost some $$$! If the drive enclosure has failed, you could possibly use another drive enclosure (same model as yours) if you can find one, to copy the data. I would check the cable as well, could be a bad cable.

RAID 0 is an odd way for a company to configure external storage... Good luck! Hopefully some more knowledgable folks will have better infor for you.

 

Trying to hunt down an enclosure now. I don't believe there is anything wrong with the drives themselves, I believe it is in the enclosure.

Thanks

 

So far my external HD has not failed but have recovered data from internal drives by mounting them as SLAVE in a working computer.
My advice is always:
1. Partition Drive in not less than 5-Gb Drive-C; not less than 2-Gb all others
2. Keep drive-C for installations - in general the drive for installing a new program is your choice as long as you choose Drive-C
3. Keep one of these partitions dedicated to the main cache (paging); click on MyComputer/Properties/Performance/Virtual Memory/Let me ... (Fear not the dire warnings.)
4. Use the remaining partitions to sort your data - letters, pictures, reference, etc.
5. My experience is that the majority of failures take place in the partition that is worked the hardest - i.e. Drive-C. Hence mount the failed unit as a Slave and recover data by Drag-&-Drop. Remember that Drive-C on the failed (now the Slave) becomes unseen.

6. I recommend Partition Magic for partitioning shenanigans.
7. Use an old computer equipped with similar hard-drive, or an external HD, to back up those data partitions. Keep the back-ups turned off but DO REMEMBER to update regularly. With this questionable technology you can't have too many back-ups.

 

Ref. Overlay nonsense in WinDVD. I believe I have to eat my words in previous posts. Cleaned up the damage caused by lightning strike but WinDVD continues to sulk and there were still a few mysterious goings-on. I returned the OS-cache to Drive_C which helped but not with WinDVD. Before embarking on a re-load of Win98 I did some house-cleaning and sent a whole load of apparently useless files to the Devil - w/o calamities. (DO BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM BEFORE YOU TRY TO COPY THIS !)

I found a reference to the fact that the swap file needs to be on Drive_C for some processes to work - see Major Geeks/Adrynalyne/How to debug memory dumps.
If required ... I can but offer my apologies. Windows software is worse than Hampton Court Maze.

Ken Green

Surprise for today ALL my problems have vanished. I can but presume that I eliminated a well-disguised virus. I do not believe that it attacked WinDVD specifically; more likely that it operates in the backgroud (doing what ???) and was gobbling-up resources.

 

did you ever find an enclosure? i have a similar problem, have removed the drives and they seem to spin up properly on another machine, but together with the enclosure i can hear the drives "trying" to work but don't seem to get started properly. it might be the brick in my case, i just need to source the electrics pinout to connect something similar. or just find a proper enclosure.

 

IT'S NOT RAID 0.

Alright I bought this hardrive 2 years ago, inside is 2 500gb drives made to look like 1tb. one of the drives failed. Everywhere I looked said it was RAID 0, people were assuming this because of the setup. After numerous failed attempts at getting my data with raid reconstructor from runtime.org (I would advise this software for an actual RAID 0 array) I did a little more reseacrh and found a post in the futureshop forums from someone with the same problem but he found out that IT IS NOT A RAID 0 SETUP. it is actually setup in concatenation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#Concatenation_.28SPAN.29

This means raid reconstructor is useless. The same guy suggested R-Studio which can rebuild the volume set. My cousin has a copy and he's letting me use it right now. It works.

The software is very expensive ($900) but there may be other cheaper software available for others.

I am posting this everywhere I can because I saw a lot of posts with the exact same problem I had and they had lost all of their data and were failing to recover it because they think it is RAID 0, so hopefully I can help at least one person somewhere with the same problem. There is also a 2tb version out there setup the same way.

 

I was presented with a dead 1T drive, with raid 0 on 2 500g drives I believe.
It was recognized but XP asked for formatting. From "Run" or command line I ran " chkdsk d: /f " - "d" being your drive letter. Most data was recovered but large files were still getting errors copying.

Good luck. From what I hear just get new drive. I'd get a good USB drive case and purchase a 3.5" 1T drive and put it in yourself. Even get 2 and copy your data redundantly, (is your data worth $200.00?) using something like Cobian Backup.