Trying to rescue data from WD My Book Studio II, raid 0

Question

For a friend I'm trying to recover data from a Western Digital My Book Studio II external disk drive enclosure in raid 0 mode.

At first I tried to rescue the data under OSX, the OS used by the friend. Since the unit would not even power on, we called WD and they sent over a new enclosure. After putting in the hard drives in the new enclosure they are recognized by OSX and the contents is even shown. Unfortunately as soon as we try to copy data from the unit disconnects.

So now I'm trying to see if I can get to the data under Linux. I've put the hard disks in a Linux box:

root@sysresccd /root % fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1  4294967294  2147483647   ee  GPT

[*snip of OS disk*]
root@sysresccd /root % 

after which I've tried to create a software raid array using different block sizes (all powers of 2 from 2^3 through to 2^32) and the two different orders for the disks (/dev/sda,/dev/sdb and /dev/sdb,/dev/sba). But for each of combinations I get one of the following failures:

• mdadm fails with the message "RUN_ARRAY failed: Invalid argument"
• mount fails with the message "hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock"
• mount fails without a message but a kernel bug is logged in the syslog

I'm actually out of ideas at the moment, can anyone point me further or should I break the bad news to my friend?