A logistics operator on the Ansty park outside Coventry keeps its delivery paperwork, driver records and photographs of damaged consignments on a two-bay Netgear ReadyNAS in a cupboard behind the transport office. Somebody restarted it after a power cut. It never came back. The lights ran through their sequence and stopped, no share appeared on the network and the web interface would not answer. The transport manager needed six years of proof-of-delivery scans, some of which were the only evidence in two live insurance claims, and wanted to know whether the disks themselves were in trouble.
| Media | A two-bay Netgear ReadyNAS that will not complete its boot after being restarted. No shares appear and the management interface does not respond. It holds a logistics firm's delivery paperwork and claim photographs. |
| What was reported | Two-bay Netgear ReadyNAS, restarted after a power cut, never finished booting, no shares on the network, management interface unreachable, six years of delivery scans and claim photographs needed, two live insurance claims depending on them. |
| Fault class | A failure in the unit rather than in the storage. The operating system and configuration a NAS keeps on its own member disks had been damaged when the power went, so the box could not start itself. The data volume across the two disks was intact and could be assembled without the unit ever booting again. |
| On the bench | Both member disks removed and labelled with their bay order, then read individually behind a hardware write blocker so nothing could be written to either. Each was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, and both profiled healthy with no clean-air work required. The array geometry and the volume layered on top of it were reconstructed from the images in R-Studio and cross-read in UFS Explorer as an independent check, the shares were rebuilt from the assembled volume, and the delivery scans and photographs were validated and written to fresh media. |
A NAS is a computer, and computers fail separately from their disks. The box runs a small operating system, keeps its configuration somewhere and mounts the storage as its own job. When it stops booting, the honest first question is which of those has broken. Very often it is the operating system, and the disks underneath it are as healthy as they were the day before.
These units keep their own system on the same disks as your files. That is a sensible design and it has one consequence worth knowing: a power failure can damage the system area without touching the data volume, because the two live in different partitions with very different write patterns. The system area is being written constantly. The delivery scans had not been touched in years.
The volume does not need the unit to exist. The layout the box uses is a documented arrangement, and a set of images taken from the members carries everything needed to assemble it in software. That is why replacing the NAS, or waiting for a repair, was never the route to the data. It also means that a second identical unit is not a solution to be tried at home.
The genuinely dangerous move is the one the manual suggests. Faced with a box that will not boot, the obvious step is to reinstall the firmware or run the factory recovery. Both will happily write a new configuration and, on some models, initialise the volume as part of restoring the unit to working order. Doing that with two live insurance claims on the disks would have been an expensive afternoon.
Both disks came out and were labelled with the bay they had occupied, which matters because the order is part of the geometry. Read behind a write blocker, both profiled healthy: full speed, no unstable regions and nothing needing clean-air work, so each was imaged straight through in a single pass.
The layout was reconstructed from the images rather than assumed. R-Studio identified the member roles, the stripe arrangement and the volume manager sitting above it, and the whole thing was assembled and then read a second time in UFS Explorer to make sure two independent tools agreed about the same directory tree. They did. The shares came out as they had been on the network, with the folder structure intact, and a sample from every year of scans was opened before anything was written to fresh media.
Six years of proof-of-delivery scans came back, including both sets that the insurance claims turned on, along with the driver records and the damage photographs. The two disks were returned as they arrived, in case the firm wanted to attempt a rebuild of the unit itself later, and they were advised to buy a new box rather than trust that one.
A multi-disk set starts at from £500 + VAT and rises with the number of members; a two-bay unit sits at the bottom of that band. Neither disk needed the lid off and nothing was lifted off a circuit, so no fix, no fee applied and the invoice waited until the scans had been checked.
Leave the disks where they are and switch the unit off. The temptation is to run the manufacturer's recovery, reinstall the firmware or try the disks in a replacement box, and every one of those can write a new configuration over the layout your files sit inside. If you take the disks out, and it is reasonable to do so, label them with the bay they came from before they leave the chassis, because the order is part of how the volume is assembled and guessing it later costs time. Photograph the front of the unit first. Do not put a member disk into a Windows machine and accept an offer to initialise it. When it comes to sending them, member disks travel on their own rather than inside the enclosure, each one wrapped separately and numbered, and it is worth saying how the shares were arranged, since a rebuilt volume is much easier to hand back in a shape you recognise.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at from £500 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. Nothing here called for the disk to be opened, a board rebuilt or a chip lifted off, which puts the work on the logical side of the line and under no fix, no fee. Files back, invoice follows; nothing back, nothing owed, and the media goes home either way. Four sorts of work sit outside that promise and only those four: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. The rest keep it, firmware and service-area repair included — both are logical jobs whatever their reputation suggests.
If yours is doing the same thing. This set of disks was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
Scoring removes the magnetic layer, so the honest question is how much of the surface it missed
A tone instead of a spin-up is a motor drawing current it cannot turn into movement
A replacement board without the original ROM is a stranger's brain in the wrong body
A NAS that will not finish booting? Ring 0800 689 0668 and leave the disks alone. Arrays start at from £500 + VAT with the assessment free.