“This tip, while it does not always work, should be given a try first. You would be amazed at how often it does work and saves the bacon. Mac OS X hard drive issues: Sometimes you can’t see the drive or think the drive is fried. Try connecting it to a Mac OS 9 Mac.
I have had two massive failures over the years and this saved the bacon. My first one had to do with an early deployement of a OS X 10.1 server. The drives were mirrored by using an Adaptec card. 39160 card. Seems that the card, software and Apples RAID software did not want to co-exist together. I had a massive failure. Thought I might have to send the drives to Drive Savers. They suggested I hook one of the drives up to a OS 9 mac.
Lo and behold, there were my files. I copied them off and reformatted the hard drives. Used a ATTO card in place of the Adaptec and everything was hunky dory. This won’t always work but if it does it will save you time and money.”