Someone brought in a LaCie bigdisk 1TB for me to work on. Provided two power packs.
BOTH packs were dead. Well, not totally dead, but neither was supplying the full +12 so the drives just chattered when powered on.
I was able to get it to spin them up by using an adapter I happened to have here. But when plugged in, the mac wanted to format it. After talking with the customer, I disassembled the enclosure and SWITCHED the two 500gb drives. Then the volume LaCie mounted fine.
Turns out they'd already taken it to someone else that told them the enclosure was shot (since BOTH packs couldn't POSSIBLY both be bad!) and had inadvertently switched the hard drives when removing them for testing. (since switching drives in a primitive raid stripe like that is all kinds of bad) hah... guess we know who THAT customer will be bringing their stuff to from now on?
And of course the fan in the "bigdisk" (well that's not quite how we refer to them around here) wasn't spinning. Those fans have about a 2 month MTBF as far as I can tell. Usually cooks the drives. Considering the fan and how common power pack failures are (obviously), I told them to get a replacement enclosure and we'd copy the data to the new one.
