Data Recovery Case File · Desktop RAID · The Stripe Problem

Half of every video: why his "successfully recovered" footage wouldn't play — and the reassembly that fixed it

On paper, this customer had already rescued himself twice before writing to us. His 6TB LaCie had died around a power outage; a replacement power supply from the manufacturer didn't revive it; so he pulled the two drives inside, ran consumer recovery software, and saved everything it found to a separate disk. Except the result rang wrong: four years of MOV and MP4 footage had come back largely as "RAW stuff which doesn't play." Then, on advice, he'd formatted both original drives — though, as he carefully noted, written nothing since. His question — "are you able to help at all?" — had a better answer than he feared, hiding inside the reason his rescue hadn't worked.

Why every big file came back broken

The unplayable footage wasn't damaged — it was incomplete by construction. His LaCie hadn't kept one volume per drive: it had striped a single 6TB volume across both disks, dealing data out in alternating chunks — a slice to drive one, a slice to drive two, over and over — so that every large file existed as interleaved halves, neither drive holding one whole video anywhere on its platters. Consumer software pointed at one drive did exactly what it honestly could: found the file signatures and carved out what was locally present — every other slice — producing files of plausible names and hopeless contents. (The small files that did work in his rescue set are the confirming detail: anything smaller than one stripe chunk lives entirely on a single drive and survives a single-drive carve intact.) As for the formats: painful advice, but survivably wrong — a quick format rewrote a sliver of fresh, empty paperwork at the front of each disk, and with his admirable discipline of writing nothing since, four years of interleaved footage sat beneath it untouched, waiting only to be read as a pair.

The recovery — reassembling the deck

Both members were imaged in full on the TaskForce 2; every subsequent step happened to copies. In Data Extractor, the stripe's parameters were established from the data's own testimony — which drive led, and how large each dealt slice was, read from the surviving structures and confirmed against the internal anatomy of the video files themselves, whose headers and frame streams only flow correctly when the interleave is right. The two images were then joined into the virtual whole the LaCie had always presented, the original volume rose from beneath the format's thin new paperwork, and the extraction ran with the only acceptance test that matters for footage: files that play. Four years of MOVs and MP4s came off the reassembled volume with names, dates and folder structure intact, sampled end-to-end across the timeline for playback, and delivered on a new single drive — with his earlier rescue set retired, its working small files deduplicated in, its broken large ones finally explained and discarded.

Outcome

Effectively complete recovery of footage that had been "successfully recovered" once already into uselessness. The lesson deserves bold type because this exact story arrives weekly: if a storage product contains more than one drive, never recover the drives individually — pooled, spanned or striped, the disks are pages of one book, and single-disk tools return confetti with filenames. And if that's already happened to you: stop writing, keep both drives together, and take heart from this page — even formatted afterwards, the book was still there. It just needed reading in order.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.