Hey guys,

Sorry this is a long story. I originally bought a Hitachi External Hard

Drive Duo Pro Drive 4TB for my office. Had it for about 6 months. Now it

pooped out and will not power on. Tried many trial and errors. Still no

avail and Ultimately, I ended up disassembling the External Unit, which

consisted of two SATA 2TB HD's.

When i first bought the external HD, I formatted it as NTFS. Now when i

insert 1 of the 2 hard drives, windows says it is a RAW and must be

formatted in order to use. The 2nd HD has the same story. I dont get it

and i am completely lost. I have lots of work that is really important

and need them recovered.

Is it possible to take the two HDD's and insert them into a new external enclosure? I have never done anything like this before and need Data storgae Expert help!

Thank you!

Hello noobcannon and welcome to HotHardware :)  I might not be the best to help but I will try.  Do you happen to know if the disks were set up in a mirror raid since I didn't see you mention that?

Well to be honest, im not sure. I know in the back of the hard drive, the only settings were Raid 0 and Raid 1. I never bothered to educate myself when it came to Raid's. But i think the default setting is Raid 0 (theres a switch in the back that you can lift up or down).

I honestly don't know if they were set up as mirror raid. All I know is that i checked one HDD in my desktop then swapped out the 2nd one. And I realized that both hard drives need to be set up as a dynamic hard drive in order to work properly. So i took out cables from my CD ROM drive and added both at the same time into the desktop. Set them up as a dynamic disk in management. and still doesn't work.

I've read people saying simply insert the external HDD into your desktop and should work. But I'm thinking i am not properly setting up the dynamic disks correctly?

Thanks for your time LBowen. Really appreciate it. :)

Ok when the External Hard Drive was functioning, it was recognized as a single unit, meaning it was Raid-0.

Yep< since it was seen as a single 4gb sector then they were in a raid array. You might be able to set up a raid array with the two of them and that might save the data. But It might not work 100% its hard to say

If your DATA is truly important enough,......

The only cheaper way that I know of to get that DATA back is what I did for my son's external drive. It's expensive, but a lot less than a DATA recovery service, and it will work. His was a Lacie brand with two 1GB drives in it. I bought another Lacie enclosure just like the first one, and swapped the drives into it, and it worked. The first enclosure that handled the RAID had failed, and the only way I knew to recover the DATA (extremely important DATA too) was to duplicate the conditions of the original box.

The second two hard drives ended up in a Drobo with everything backed up to it, and then the original two drives added to the Drobo to increase it's redundancy. It actively monitors the health of the drives you put in it and warns of any impending crashes, so you can deal with it before it becomes a problem.

After you solve this, a Drobo is an elegant and safe solution for backing up your DATA. Well worth the money spent.

Until the drobo unit itself crashes like ours at work did. Pretty scary knowing terbytes of data might have been lost.

As far as the problems goes, I haven't had experience with raids but my guess would be try and set up a raid like was suggested before me otherwise @realneil's suggestion of buying the same enclosure would be the easiest solution.

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm  It's a program that gets the raid data off of the drives and reconstructs the files in a different location. For this though you would need another drive/drives to put the data on while it reconstructs. Not sure how much you had on your 4tb external.

I would go with realneil's suggestion.  You can definitely figure something out and avoid money spent on recovery and backup services.