RAID & NAS · bench notes · NTG-2025-2064
Out of the Chassis, and Still Invisible.
In a farm office outside Boston a Seagate Personal Cloud went missing off the network. A neighbour of theirs works in IT and did the sensible things. Out came the disk, into a USB dock, with Windows given the driver the forums all recommend for Linux partitions
. It made no difference. Windows sees the disk perfectly well. It just says there is nothing on it.
An offer to initialise the thing came next, and he sensibly declined. Everything older had been moved off elsewhere long ago. The last eighteen months had not.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
One suspect had been ruled out by his own work: the filesystem was sound. That left two. Take the disk first. Some sectors reply straight away; others hesitate, and go on hesitating, and no ordinary desktop has a strategy for it. It waits, gives up the read, and calls the disk empty. Then take the way the appliance builds things up. Nothing as plain as ext4 goes straight onto the platters of a domestic NAS. Partitioning of its own goes down first; a volume manager sits over that; and the filesystem lives inside the two. Which is how perfectly good sectors can arrive at a Windows driver that can do nothing with them.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Carried on reading through hesitations that had beaten both of his machines | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Took apart the layers stacked between these platters and the folders the office worked in | Works the stripe out again, then unpicks the volume manager the NAS laid on top |
| R-Studio Technician | Set the contents of the rebuilt shares against what the family expected to be in them | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Repeat his test, on lab hardware
Everything he had found came back on the bench, this time with figures against it. Some reads answered inside a few milliseconds; others needed close to thirty seconds. Fast and slow sat mixed across the surface in an arrangement nobody could work out. Behaviour of that kind buys two or three tries from an operating system and no more; both of his machines had stopped right there.
Imaging hardware that does not quit at the first hesitation
Timeouts were deliberately shortened, and every hesitation got a reset instead of a wait. A good deal of the surface turned out to be sound, so the pass moved along at a fair rate. Ground that gave trouble was noted and stepped over, then gathered at the end, when nothing readable was still exposed.
Unpick the layers in the order this appliance built them
Everything from there happened on the image, and it followed the sequence the appliance had used itself: partition table first, then the volume manager, then ext4. That order brought the shares back in the shape this family knew, with eighteen months of photographs — held nowhere else at all — sitting where they had always been.
What was returned.
An ordinary external drive took those eighteen months home, to stand alongside the years already safe. Nothing the neighbour did made this harder: he worked read-only from start to finish, which spared us ground we would have had to cover ourselves. What this one needed was imaging hardware, and a decode worked through layer by layer, and software alone was never going to manage that. Two copies of everything is the rule at the farm now.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other RAID & NAS jobs, written up.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.