How to get data out of a Maxtor Shared Storage II that fails to boot?
- by Jonik
I've got a Maxtor Shared Storage II (RAID1 mode) which has developed some hardware failure, apparently: it fails to boot properly and is unreachable via network.
When powering it on, it keeps making clunking/chirping disk noise and then sort of resets itself (with a flash of orange light in the usually-green LEDs); it then repeats this as if stuck in a loop. In fact, even the power button does nothing now – the only way I can affect the device at all is to plug in or pull out the power cord!
(To be clear, I've come to regard this piece of garbage (which cost about 460 €) as my worst tech purchase ever. Even before this failure I had encountered many annoyances about the drive: 1) the software to manage it is rather crappy; 2) it is way noisier that what this type of device should be; 3) when your Mac comes out of sleep, Maxtor's "EasyManage" cannot re-mount the drive automatically.)
Anyway, the question at hand is how to get my data out of it? As a very concrete first step, is there a way to open this thing without breaking the plastic casing into pieces? It is far from obvious to me how to get beyond this stage; it opens a little from one end but not from the other. If I somehow got the disks out, I could try mounting the disk(s) on one of the Macs or Linux boxes I have available (although I don't know yet if I'd need some adapters for that).
(NB: for the purposes of this question, never mind any warranty or replacement issues – that's secondary to recovering the data.)
