External Drive Issue

[FXP]

I need some info on external drives. I just got a new Lenovo laptop with Windows 8.1. I had an HP with Windows 7 and attached to it was an Eagle external enclosure that housed two one TRB drives. These drives have all my critical backups and archives using Ghost 15. It seems Eagle is no more and my Lenovo laptop isn't recognizing the drives on it. I've been futzing around, but no luck. My question is if I take out the hard-drives and put them in a new enclosure will I then be able to read them without messing them up? Does the external enclosure modify them in some way? Furthering my problem is no support for the Eagle and I'm told Ghost doesn't run on Window 8 and they are discontinuing it. I can get another Window 7 computer to do the transfers if I know taking the drives out won't do any damage. If you are familiar with how external drives work I'd appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.

 

[rclarke250]

hmm, okay, First I am going to assume, you mean (2) 1 TB hard drives, as TRB is not a known acronym. Eagle Tech is still around eagletechusa. Granted their web site sux, and there is hardly any information to be gained there.

But since you give no information as to what the model is, I have no idea if it is just a JBOD enclosure, or NAS that can incorporate RAID technologies. As long as it is just a simple SATA to USB enclosure with no software that needs to be run, or integral encryption like some boxes do. You should be able to drop into another enclosure and read the data. It shouldn't mess the data up, but you don't even say how the drives were utilized. was it as a big single spanned drive, creating a single 2 TB drive? was it a mirror? 2 drives with the same data on each? One striped drive? (RAID 1) Or 2 separate drives each with their own drive letter? There are a multitude of external drives, and enclosures, a little more information would be helpful.

 

[FXP]

HI,

The Eagle drive I have has a serial number, but no model or other identifying information except the name Eagle. In the manual it states its manufactured by the Consus Division which is no more. The drive is setup as a JBOB each drive is separate and addressable separately. The drives were strictly used to backup my two pc's archiving data files using Ghost. Using Ghost on my Win 8 is another issue, but I still have my Win 7 pc with can use it to retrieve the data if I an get the drive to work. Its odd that the two machines (Lenovo and Sony) don't see these external drives. MY original workhorse HP had a motherboard failure, but backed up fine the last time when it died a week later. So from what you said I can just buy another enclosure with Win 8 drivers and transfer these enclosure drives over and they should be fine? Did I get that right. Thanks for the help.

 

[goombawaho]

I think you meant JBOD. Terminology is important for troubleshooting. If you said it was RAID1 when it was actually RAID0 - big trouble. But with JBOD you can deal with each drive separately.

I would take one drive out very carefully and put it in another computer either as an internal slave drive OR using an external USB-to-SATA adapter. Link

That way, you can test each drive to see if you can see data. If you can see data on both, then it was just the enclosure. Only then would you buy/replace the enclosure. It COULD be that one drive is causing the problem, but likely it's the enclosure.

Any enclosure should allow you to see the drives/data in Windows 8. Ghost on Windows 8 is a separate issue as you said.

Its odd that the two machines (Lenovo and Sony) don't see these external drives.

Not if the enclosure is broken in some way!

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