RAID-0 parameters for MyBook Studio II, Model wd20000h2q-00?

Hello,

I’m trying to recover data from a MyBook Studio II, Model wd2000h2q-00 which contained two 1 TB Western Digital Green drives.

This external storage was used on a Mac. It does have a GPT table, and HFS+ partition and was much probably in RAID-0, totalizing 1893 GB if remember well.

The number of defective sectors was about 44 MB for drive A, which had the GPT and 4096 bytes for drive B.
The cloned drives that I’m currently using were checked as free from defective sectors.
For the data recovery, I’m of course working with the clones and not the original drives.

I tried probing the drives to automatically detect the parameters of the RAID-0, but they were several possibles and no significant result. Most files were binary ones or in markup languages such as xml, making difficult to detect discontinuities on the drives in order to guess the length of the stripes.

After some tentative with 16 sectors chunks, I could use the reconstructed RAID to access  the content of two pdf files in hexadecimal.
I could find within them the file start signature “%PDF” at 0x800 and 0x1800, i.e. with an offset of 2048 bytes for the first “reconstructed” file, respectively 6144 (=4096 + 2048) bytes for the second one.
This make me think that the stripes could have been picked and reassembled in the wrong order.
Also the size of stripes could be wrong.

Can someone tell me :

  1. Which are the “factory settings” for the RAID-0 used by this storage (i.e. size of stripes, offset, a.s.o, …) ?
       
  2. If there is some software/driver that I could use to try accessing this storage on Windows (despite it was used on Mac) or possibly on Linux ?
    I keep hope that the damages to the filesystem are not too important and because the cloned disk are sane, the storage could possibly work again.

Thanks a lot.

Hello,

Have you tried contacting support?

Contact WD

I had the idea that I could create some RAID-0 configuration using the My Book Studio II storage and copy a few files to it in order to later perform a detection of the RAID parameters.

So, I put two 500 GB fresh drives inside the enclosure and hoped that I could initialize a RAID-0.

I planned then to copy a few files to the storage, so that I could later perform an automatic detection of the RAID parameters and then apply them to recover the data from the defective configuration.

When I connected the storage in USB,  the “wd” icon blinked on a red background.

I opened WD Raid Manager and could see the storage, but could not find any way to reset the drives.

I saw a window like the one on page 22 of the manual  (Chapter 7) :
http://www.wdc.com/WDProducts/Library/UM/ENG/4779-705010.pdf

(You have to jump to slide 28 in this online PDF version.)

Of course, there was no sane RAID detected. The “Next” button was greyed and I could not go further.

I wonder if the impossibility to set a new RAID-0 comes from the fact that the My Book Studio II is for Mac and that I ran WD RAID Manager on Windows Vista, or from the fact that I used a different model of drive than the WD Green ones.

Thank you for your help.

@Hamlet : No I have not contacted support yet, but another moderator sent me a message yesterday, telling that my post had been transmitted to the techs and that I should wait 24h to 48h.