If only I could travel back in time 20 years

I wish I had a time machine. there’s only one thing that’s starting to come to light now, and to be perfectly honest, I’m the only person who probably knows about it. As you know, I’m a music lover. I’m done with trawling the charity shops for good CDs though. Now I trawl the charity shops for obscure CDs.

You know the type. A local band, usually consisting of a few ex-school friends or work colleagues. They get together and form a band. They record some tracks, they burn a few copies, print out a lovely case, and even stick a fancy paper label on there using one of the many, many CD labelling kits around at the time. They give some to their mates, maybe give some away at gigs when they do something at their local pub.

They eventually drift apart, and the bands get forgotten about. These burned CDs occasionally end up in charity shops, and I happily hoover them up. I’ve found some absolute pearlers of songs amongst them, some of which I intend to go through and document here in the future.

Anyway, that’s a story for another post. What I’m writing about here is that a lot of these CDs are now sadly unplayable.

Remember a few lines above where I mentioned that the bands / individuals will stick labels on the disks to make them look nice? Well, it seems those lovely labels are robbing future listeners of the opportunity to hear their music.

I, thankfully, haven’t found too many examples of this over time, but I know I’m going to find more, and it means that some songs are lost forever. No matter how small a band is or however long they’ve lasted, if they liked their music enough to put it onto record it, put it on a CDR and distribute it to a few people, then it simply deserves to be listened to by future generations… or, me.

Anyway, this all came about several years ago. I found a CD in a charity shop. It was a home-burned one, meaning it was all inkjet printed. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly do this with CDs. I wanted to hear this.

The CD had one of those Inkjet label maker things on it. They were in every staionery store throughought the land in the 2000s. I put the CD in, attempted to rip it, and “nothing”. Or rather, It did eventually rip, but my CD drive sounded like it was having a nervous breakdown, and must have took an hour. I attempted to play it, but the sound was completely garbled. If you loaded it into Audacity, you could see the shape of a song there, but zoom in and the whole thing resembled a square wave. I tried this particular disc on many CD players. It was able to recognise it as a CD (the table of contents is stored in a very small area, only a few bytes at the beginning of the disc) but playing any of the tracks was a complete failure.

This CD was by a band called “Beckett”, and for all I know, this could have been the only copy ever produced, and now it’s gone for good. There are plenty of bands out there with the same name, but none of them appear to have the same tracklisting as what this CD contained.

Anyway, Last Saturday, I was in a charity shop, and picked up this.

It’s called “What’s In A Box” by a band called “Serving Suggestion”, released in 2002. It was 99p, and factory sealed. Enough for me to take a punt on it. Fast forward 8 days, I rip the cellophane off. I hope the image above just shows how pristine this thing was. Also, note that there’s none of your inkjet muck here. The case was professionally designed and printed.

The actual design of the case is clever. The disk was printed like a pizza…

Lift the CD out, and the underside of the inlay had a greasy mark printed, where the CD sat. It actually gave me a giggle.

I slapped the CD in, expecting to be greeted with some South African early 2000s indie tunes. After a minute or so, I got nothing. I took the CD out and examined it. From the naked eye, it looks absolutely pristine, after never being played before…

Ignore the dust, my phone loves picking up stuff like that. After a quick wipe, there was nay a mark to be seen, but I couldn’t be arsed reuploading the photo.

I turned the disk over, and realised that yes, this bloody disk had a paper label. It wasn’t apparent at first, as this was a nicely presented CD, but the scientific method of trying to lift it with my nail proved once and for all at this was, indded a paper label…

And, if you view the data portion in just the right light, you can see the issue… the bit where the data is stored has taken on a leapord-skin appearance, and is no longer a uniform shade.

It’s especially prominent to the left of the image, with that leapord-skin blotching. You can see where the lighter data section clearly had dark blobs on it. I can only assume that, over time, the glue on the label has reacted with either the dye on the disk, or the foil layer, or a combination of both. It’s sort-of like a “modern day” equivalent of the CD Bronzing fiasco that happened in the late 80s / early 90s. I don’t expect for this post to actually resonate with anyone, but I know there will be millions of people out there that will have used these CD labels and have precious memories stored on CDRs. Maybe it’s time to download the data from them before they all rot.

EDIT: I did try this disc on another machine, with different software,in the vain hope it’ll make any difference. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I’ll probably end up just binning this CD, but all is not lost. I’ve scanned all of the artwork in, and there’s a Discogs entry for this particular disc, and the artwork isn;t very good, so I’ll replace mine with that one. the case will go on to replace a damaged case.

Cleaning Amiga floppy disks – success!

It seems an extremely long time since I’ve updated this with any Amiga stuff, so I thought I’d do a quick update.

It’s a disgustingly wet August Saturday, and I’ve recently been accumulating more Amiga disks off ebay, and imaging them with the good old Greaseweazle, which is still going strong.

As part of the process of imaging them, I’m also grabbing the file listings off the disk, and putting them into a database. This is, so far, a long laborious procedure, and at the moment, I don’t know what purpose it’s going to serve, but doing this at least gives me a chance to test that the disks have ripped successfully, at least to a point.

Anyway, as the afore-mentioned weather is cack, I thought I’d spend an hour or two goiung through some of my recent images and getting rhe file listings. Anyway, after about 4 disks, I got the dreaded “read error” message one one of the disks I’d imaged.

Not fun. I loaded up hxc to check the disk image in a more thorough way, and sure enough, there were two bad sections of the disk, one on each side.

I went through and checked the disk, and there they were… mould spots.


Ugh. The bain of any old media collector. It’s just something that happens. These disks must be… oooh, dunno. 30 years old now, so any slightest but of organic material that’s crept on the disk in that time has obviously been taken over.

I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on this when the disk was getting images. A mould spot this severe would have definitely created a tell-tale noise when the disk was being imaged – a definitive click-click-click as the mould spot makes contact with the head, about once every 1/20 of a second.

Anyway, I had hopes of resurrecting this one. I took a tiny bit of IPA on the end of a cotton bud, and very lightly rubbed the surface. You don’t want to put any pressure on at all. The surface of the disk needs to be perfectly flat, and any slight ripple in the surface will render the disk useless and the data gone.

I didn’t get any pictures of this, so I don’t think you need much of an imagination to picture what I did.

Thankfully, the mould was no match for the IPA, and within seconds, it was lifted. I used the dry side of the cotton bud to remove any possible residue, and left it to dry for a couple of minutes. Obviously, IPA dries on its own really quickly, but the last time I tried this, I must have put far too much on and ruined the disk, and possibly didn’t help the drive much either.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is worth two in a bush, so did the disk actually work after I’d tried all this?


Oh, I’d say that was a success.

As a side note, I know I was holding the disk myself. I’m aware that you can buy little disk cleaning cradles that will hold the shutter open for you while you do this. I actually have one, but didn’t have it to hand when I did this.

It’s August 1st! That must mean it’s… EQUITES DAY!

I wrote this post back on August 1st 2018. It was so bad, I never let it see the light of day. Fast forward a year later, it’s still as terrible, but as I haven’t written anything for two months, I thought you might as well see it.

“Uhhh, what?” I hear you ask. No, don’t worry, it won’t mean anything to anybody but me, and you’ll have to forgive me for going into a long, drawn out ramble about something that’ll mean nothing to anyone else, but then that describes the vast majority of posts in here.

“Equites” was an arcade game, pusblished by defunct software company Apha Denshi in the mid 80s. It was a relatively novel vertical shoot ’em up, where you controlled a ship that could either walk along the ground, or fly in the air, and you had to shoot things, though you probably worked that out by the name “shoot ’em up”.

Now, to be honest, it was a rare game. I’ve only ever seen one copy in the wild.

Let’s fly back to the very late 80s. Exactly this time of year, every year, we would go to Sandy Bay, a caravan site I’ve mentioned before, on the outskits of Ashington. Every night, there would be a supervised disco thing for the kids, called the Sandy Bay Smilers Club. You know the score. You’d get put in a room with loud music that served pop and crisps, and some adults would tell you to not play with the fire doors. In the corner of this room were (usually) four arcade cabinets. Lady Bug, Frogger, Mag Max, and a little dusty one in the corner that was never switched on, without a name.

None of these were maintained very well. Ladybug had a monitor fault, which meant it was too blurry to see for the first 10 minutes. You could kick Frogger, and get 99 credits. Mag Max refused to boot up most of the time with a “RAM TEST NG” error, and the little mystery one was Equites.

Now the reason why it was usually switched off is, of course, it didn’t work properly. It had intermittent faults, all absolutely fascinating to me as a 9-year old, whose only experience in computers had been the ZX Spectrum, and it’s limited pallette.

I’d switch it on, wait for the CRT to warm up. If I was lucky, I’d get to see the game’s self test screen..

I’d get a good new minutes out of playing it, but then things would start to go wrong. Graphics would go wonky, things would stop working as they should, and eventually it would crash. It was the crash modes that held the most fascination for me. Sometimes the selftest would go red, and it wouldn’t boot up any further.

Sometimes it would crash with a text error on the screen. Now, knowing computers like I did back then, if a program brought up an error message and stopped running, you could LIST the program and see how it worked.

When this particular game crashed, if you waggled the joystick enough, you could get letters to appear underneath the error.

Could I possibly work out a combination that would list the source code of the game? Well, here’s a typical “crashed” error message…

Now, playing around with MAME, I can’t find any way to enter a character after these error messages appear. It’s possible to get the error messages to appear by randomly corrupting a saved state file, the game crashes and the “CPU” hangs. Therefore, my conclusion is that the movement of the joystick/cabinet caused my a loose/faulty chip, would insert corrupted data into the RAM, eventually causing the game to crash with the error, and that my constant “waggling” would corrupt the next byte following the end of the error message, making it look like it was typing something, but was nothing more than the faulty chip corrupting the next byte of memory after the error.

OH MY! I really need to tetype that paragraph!

Anyway, as far as I know, things didn’t end well for Equites. We stopped going to Sandy Bay, except for one fleeting visit in 1994/95ish. We were in the area visiting one of my dad’s freinds, and decided to pop round and have a look. The Smiler’s club had been demolished, along with the shed that was once the arcades. It’s more likely that, due to the dwindling popularity of the older games, and the unlikeliness of them being repaired properly, that they just ended up getting carted off to landfill, or just left in there when the buildings got demolished. I like to think that somewhere, there’s a shed, with all of the old games I used to play there, all fully restored and working, but I doubt that’s the case

And, so, this is why August 1st, to me, is known as “Equites Day”. In conclusion, a mildly entertaining arcade game, brightened up infititely by triggering things you were never meant to see anyway!

I also vote August 3rd as being “World’s Worst Blog Post Day”

EDIT: Just to confirm ( I can’t see why anyone would question this), but I have indeed kept up this tradition, playing this game last year on August 1st, and also this year…

I do love my little stupid traditions.

Ant And Dec broke my phone

Oh, the loveable Geordie duo. Seldom seen on our screens of more recent times, they’re still apparently working on projects together, namely the announcements at the M+S tills.

Thursday was just like an ordinary day Went to work, played pool, checked Facebook on a regular basis. It was there, that something caught my eye. I had been tagged in a post. It seems that M+S have started doing chicken vindaloo sandwiches. this obviously perked my interest, and understandably, I spent most of Friday morning, at work, hoping thatmy local branch still had some in. It’s about a 15 minute walk from where I work, to there. This was, as far as I can remember, the first time I’ve been in one of these stores on my own. Almost 40 years avoiding it, and it’s a slippery slope to being in there every day, wearing their cardigans and loose fitting brown trousers…

Er, anyway, off I toddle to the sandwich section, and there they were. Chicken vindaloo! £3. Ergh. This was the most I’d ever paid for a sandwich, so it had better be special. I opted for using the self-service checkpoints. I scanned my first item, and there they were. “HI! I’M ANT, I’M DECLAN, A DUO, A TWOSOME, MANY PAYMENT OFTIONS, SO GO AHEAD AND CHOOSE ‘EM”. That’s not what the checkout really said, but you get the picture. It was some tie-in with Britain’s Got Talent, a programme which I assume they present, or something. They’ve recorded announcments for the tills, and this is why I blame them for breaking my phone. their kind, northern tones lulled my into a false sense of security.

I deposited my coins, and walked away. I bit into the sandwich, and oh yes, it was lovely. A nice taste, with a really spicy kick. I was impressed. I’m always wary when I eat new stuff, especially sandwiches and things. I hate pretty much everything that comprises most sandwiches, so I was surprised to find this one edible.

Anyway, Friday afternoon went without a hitch, and after I’d finished, Jamie S picked me up, and we headed off to Newcastle. It was at this point, something didn’t feel right. A bit of a pain in the ol’ belly area. It’s a feeling that does occasionallly happen, mainly thanks to by diet, and I knew that it’d be mere minutes until I’d… erm. Yeah, you can work that out for yourself.

So, yeah, anyway, here we are, booling up the A19 towards the town, and things got rather pressing. To take a line from a Spandau Ballet song… “In these troubled times, desperation keeps us strong”. Oh yes, something was certainly doing the conga down my colon. Somehow, we’d made it to the first place we knew that definitely had a toilet… KFC.

I jumped out of Jamie’s car like I’ve never moved before, and that’s when my phone went hurtling across the car park. It must have been resting on my lap, and obviously, due to other thing on my mind, I forgot about it, and it got launched. Slam. Crack. Goddammit. Thankfully, the phone still works, and for the first time, I’ve edited out what happened in the toilet, because it was even too gruesome for me to talk about.

So, there we have it. If I ever bump into the Geordie duo, I’m going to blame them for doing this to my phone…

I’m sure theyll understand…

Amiganuts! POWER!

Today, I saved the life of my Amiga 1200. And I’m slightly relieved.

I’ve typed on here several times about my love of the Amiga 1200, the computer I received on Xmas Day 1993. But what do I mean about saving its life? I removed the battery. Yep, that’s it. I took the battery out. “Hang on”, says both of the Amiga aficionados reading this, “The Amiga didn’t have a battery”. Well, mine did, because I bought a memory expansion which also shipped with a real-time clock, and obviously, a battery backup for it.

Back in 2007, I dragged my Amiga out for a quick play, to see if a problem with the video circuitry had fixed itself in the 10 years it had been in storage. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t and my screen was still just a jumbled mess. OH WELL. Back in the cupboard it went.

Years went by, and that cupboard fell pretty much out of action. Certain room reorganisations, and knowing there wasn’t much stuff in that particular cupboard meant it wasn’t really accessible anymore. But my Amiga was safe in storage.

Fast forward to 2013. Dave Jones, aka EEVBlog, posted a video about an old Archimedes computer he’d been sent. The video was going great, until he’d opened it up and found that the RTC battery had leaked, completely eating away at most of the circuitry, including the ROM sockets and keyboard connections, turning the machine into a beautiful, yet pricey paperweight. My heart sank. I knew my Amiga had what looked like the same battery, and although that machine was older, it wasn’t MUCH older, and the clock battery in my Amiga hadn’t been changed since I installed the expansion board in 1995, pushing it up to 22 years. That thing must have been a goner.

I spoke to Daddykins about something random, and I mentioned about my Amiga and leaking batteries. I was surprised to find the cupboard now slightly more accessible. Enough to squeeze an arm in, and pull out an Amiga, anyway. Maybe he’d realised I was right, and the little Miggy was worth saving!

I precariously opened the underside door on the machine to see what grotty state the board was in…. Aaand.

Not a speck of corrosion. And yes, I’d taken the battery out before I’d taken this, but it was still in there, and came out perfectly shiny.

So, my Amiga might live to fight another day. If I can get that graphics issue fixed.

I have much more to say about this fantastic machine, so stay tuned for some more inane rambling shortly… Bet you can’t wait.

Hard drive woes, 2012, part 3

I’m returning back to the ‘old’ subject of my Lacie “Network Space 2” drive, which committed suicide a few months back, thanks to a couple of email questions. You may have followed the previous posts where I mention getting the data off the drive. this was, in all, a 90% success, but even running Linux, I ran into a similar problem as pointed out in the email. Some of the files couldn’t be accessed. I knew it was one I could easily overcome, but putting the time, and the little bit of effort in to do it, was a bit of a bore, so I left it.

That is, until my health problems re-arose. Well, not quite. I just had to go to the hospital so they could stick things all over my chest, and take yet more of my blood. Are they panning that shit for gold, or something? They might find amber nectar in there, but certainly no gold.

I digress. I decided to fire the drive up again, and rescue the last data on there. The problem was, that although I moved the majority of the data off the drive, I couldn’t access certain files, as they were owned by “root”, basically, the superuser of any Linux system. If you boot from a live Linux CD as I suggested in the past, you’re only a standard user. You’ll need to access the files owned by this root user.

Since my last update, I managed to find my 4Gb USB stick, so I changed my plans from using a live CD, to using a similar live CD, but mounted on a USB stick. To do this, you download the ISO you require as normal, download and run a program called Unetbootin, and allow it to work its magic. This allows you to have a USB stick with a bootable version of your favourite non-standard operating system. This was, as you can imagine, a lot quicker, smoother and quieter than having the DVD drive access something every time I move the mouse. This time, I ditched Ubuntu, and used the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint. It’s just that little more user-friendly. A couple more useful utilities , and because it’s on the USB drive, I can happily use stuff like Firefox without the whole system freezing while it uses the DVD drive.

Of course, you’ll run into the same problem you had with the original Ubuntu. You’re still a standard user. This is how you log-in as root…

Open “terminal”
Type…

sudo passwd root

It’ll then prompt you to enter a new password. Twice. It’s thorough like that.

Click on the “Start” button equivalent (forget what it’s called) and click “Leave”

There’ll be an option in there for a new session. Select that, and enter the user “root” and your new root password. Hurrah, you’ll now have a GUI with root access, and should be able to move those stubborn files as you would normally. I assume these instructions will work good with many, if not all Linux distros.

Thanks to the root access, I was able to have a poke around the drive’s “hidden” sections, and examine the “messages” file to see if I can decipher exactly what went wrong with it. Basically, I can’t.

Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  180.820000] ata1.00: status: { Busy }
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  180.820000] ata1: hard resetting link
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.330000] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl F310)
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.390000] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.390000] ata1: EH complete
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.410000] ata1: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x180000 action 0x6 frozen
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.410000] ata1: edma_err_cause=00000020 pp_flags=00000001, SError=00180000
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.410000] ata1: SError: { 10B8B Dispar }
Sep 18 02:04:44 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.410000] ata1: hard resetting link
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.920000] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl F310)
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.980000] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.980000] ata1: EH complete
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x180000 action 0x6 frozen
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1.00: edma_err_cause=00000020 pp_flags=00000001, SError=00180000
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1: SError: { 10B8B Dispar }
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:20:e0:f2:38/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 16384 in
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000]          res d0/00:20:e0:f2:38/00:03:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x12 (ATA bus error)
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1.00: status: { Busy }
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  181.990000] ata1: hard resetting link
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  182.500000] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl F310)
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  182.560000] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
Sep 18 02:04:45 NetworkSpace2 kernel: [  182.560000] ata1: EH complete
Sep 18 02:e.vendor

After the e.vendor in that above logfile, which really shouldn’t be there, is a load of corrupt looking garbage, and I’m sure those “ATA bus error”, means that there’s something wrong with the drive, or the system can’t read from it. I remember those before the HDD died in my old firewall / server machine many years ago.

I’m not sure if that info above will help anyone else out, but drop me an email if it doesn’t, I’ll see what I can do.

UPDATE 4TH NOVEMBER 2012

In what is honestly going to be my final word on the subject, I thought I’d have one last little play with the dreaded Lacie Network Space 2, and my own personal findings. I powered it on again today, for one last “hurrah”. It, once again did either of the slow flashing, or rhythmic red/blue flashing. For funsies, I threw in a generic 500Gb drive, which it won’t have been expecting. The method behind my madness was that it may have had a failsafe copy of its operating system in ROM, and if it detects the “new” HDD, it might kick into some factory restore mode and initialize the drive. This wouldn’t appear to be the case, as I instantly got the flashing red/blue light, as soon as the drive began to boot. A factory reset didn’t help either.
Therefore, I consider the drive now to be scrapped.

I’ll keep the drive out of it, naturally. 2Tb could certainly come in useful (On Dec 8th 2012, I did indeed do this, via a cheap SATA caddy from C World). I don’t believe there’s a physical fault with the drive, but I do think there was some sort of root file system corruption. A decent NAS drive would be able to at least do something failsafe-y, perhaps a backup / disagnostic copy of the OS kept in flash ROM to allow some type of automatic restore / file system rebuild… the cost of flash memory these days is ridiculously low. It can’t be too difficult / much more expensive to do?

So, it’s all over. It was a short, bittersweet relationship. It had its uses. It turned out to be very limited, slow, and ultimately risked 2 terabytes of my precious porn torrentz photos of fluffy kittens and whalesong. As a plus-side (I can think of two), the drive was easy to open, and the OS was Linux based, so the data was easily rescued.

It’s not the end of my NAS drive experience though. I enjoyed it while it lasted, and I’m feeling the need to spend some money on something bigger and better…

UPDATE 4/2/17 It took me a good few years before I relied on NAS storage again, but these days I’m running a Synology DS216j. I never went back to this Lacie heap of shit. The drive itself still survives.

UPDATE THE 3rd 28/3/21 I still swear by the Synology NAS enclosures. Really happy with them. I’m guessing that all of the LaCie drives of this type have either failed, or have been superceded by other drives by this point, so I won’t be keeping this series of posts around for much longer, but I hope it proved useful for someone. The loose 2Tb drive STILL surprives. I think. No idea where it is now.

Hard drive woes 2012, part 2

Well, I can confirm that if you have one of the Lacie Network Space 2 2TB drives and you’re worried about your data, should you begin to get the old flashy light syndroome, you can rest in piece, as there’s a chance that your data is perfectly safe, albeit, coccooned in a little shitty box with incrediby sharp corners. All you have to do is get inside that box.

And it’s actually pretty easy to get inside. I’ll say from now though, that doing the following will almost certainly void your warranty, but if you’re like me, 2Tb of precious porn legitimate data is far more important than that. The case is relatively easy to open. There’s a little clip where the LED is. Just push it in, and the case will lift straight off. There are 4 screws keeping the drive on. These are standard screws, nothing to be worried about. Mine had a warranty sticker over one of the screws, which has been subsequently popped. Oh dear.

The drive then just slides backwards to disconnect it from the SATA fitting. That’s part one done, you should be left with a hard drive in your hand. The model in mine is a Seagate Barracuda Green. Other models may vary, but it’s just a bog standard drive. You’ll need to connect it to a SATA socket, both for power and data. Dependant on what you’re using from here, getting the data off it might be slightly different. I’ll write it how I did it, using Windows. the same should be possible on a Mac, and if you’re using Linux, you should already know what you’re doing.

Before you go ahead and do anything, first check your PC is recognising the drive correctly. To do this, right-click Computer, then Manage. Your normal drives will be there, along with the new drive, with several partitions listed as “RAW”. DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE AT THIS POINT. Windows cannot recognise the paritions, and naturally, tinkering around with them is going to be an entirely fruitless excercise. You’ve shown, however, that your data should be intact, and as I mentioned before, the drive is in a format that any Linux distribution should understand.

There are many ways to go from here. Personally, I chose the soft option. I downloaded a live Ubuntu CD, burned that, and booted from it. The 2Tb drive was recognised straight away, and I found the data store in /shares/1

I’m delighted I was able to get the data off the drive, hopefully this will help someone who has had a similar issue with their LaCie drive. I’m happy to answer comments if anyone has any queries.