RAID and NAS Data Recovery for Failed and Rebuild-Stuck Arrays
If your RAID or NAS dropped a second disk during a rebuild, or the volume now shows up as RAW or won't come online, the data is very often still sitting on those platters. Most of the damage in these cases comes from what happens in the first hour, when people start clicking buttons to fix it. The safest thing you can do right now is leave the array alone and send it to us for free diagnostics so we can tell you what's actually going on.
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Start your recoverySymptoms you might be seeing
- •NAS shows 'degraded' then fails during or right after a rebuild
- •Two or more disks dropped from a RAID 5/6 array at once
- •Volume mounts as RAW, asks to be formatted, or won't mount at all
- •NAS boots but the shared folders/volume are missing or empty
- •Controller reports 'foreign config', 'no array found', or constant clicking from one disk
What NOT to do right now
- ✗Do NOT click 'rebuild,' 'repair,' or 'initialize' again. A rebuild onto a failing member can overwrite good data
- ✗Do NOT pull disks and reinsert them in a different order or different bays. Slot order and metadata matter
- ✗Do NOT run chkdsk, fsck, or a 'volume repair' on the degraded array
- ✗Do NOT force a new disk in to 'replace' a failed one while other members are still unstable
- ✗Do NOT keep power-cycling a NAS with a clicking or buzzing drive. That drive needs the clean room, not another retry
Why it happens
Most multi-disk failures look sudden but aren't. Drives bought in the same batch tend to wear out around the same time, so when one member dies and you kick off a rebuild, the long stretch of heavy reads can push a second, already-tired disk over the edge. Parity arrays like RAID 5 can't survive losing a second member in the middle of that. Other arrays go down for different reasons: corrupted RAID configuration or metadata, a failed controller or NAS motherboard, bad sectors that stall the rebuild partway through, or one member with mechanical damage (clicking heads, a seized motor) that should never have been spun back up. In almost every one of these cases the file data itself is fine across the disks. What's broken is the array's ability to put it back together.
How ChipWorx recovers it
We don't work on your original disks. Each member gets imaged at the sector level onto its own clone first, and any drive with mechanical damage goes into the clean room ahead of that for a head swap or platter work so it can be imaged without making things worse. Once we have the clones, we rebuild your array virtually from them, working out the RAID parameters (disk order, stripe size, parity rotation, offset) by reading the raw data directly instead of trusting whatever the failed controller thinks the config is. From that reconstructed virtual array we pull your files and folders, across RAID 0/1/5/6/10, JBOD, and NAS platforms like Synology (Btrfs/ext4), QNAP, Netgear, and Western Digital, including SHR. When a NAS has a dead controller board but the disks are healthy, our microsoldering bench repairs the existing board in place: replacing damaged components and reworking the connections. In the most extreme cases, where the board is too far gone to repair directly, we can move the original NAND or processor onto matched donor hardware as a last resort, but that's the exception, not the routine. The diagnostic is free, and a clear scope and timeframe come after we've seen exactly what each disk is doing.
Frequently asked questions
My NAS started rebuilding and then failed. Is the data gone?
Usually not. A failed rebuild almost always means a second disk got stressed during the rebuild reads, not that your files were wiped. The data still lives across the members, which is exactly why we image every disk and reconstruct the array from clones instead of risking another rebuild on the originals.
Do I need to send the whole NAS or just the drives?
Either works. For most arrays, sending all the drives labeled with their bay order is enough. If the NAS controller or board itself failed, send the full unit so our bench can look at it. When you're not sure, send everything. We sort it out during the free diagnostic, and our prepaid label covers the shipment.
Can you recover a Synology SHR or other proprietary NAS array?
Yes. SHR, Btrfs and ext4 Synology volumes are routine for us, along with QNAP, Netgear, and WD platforms. Because we rebuild the array virtually from sector-level clones, we don't need the NAS itself to boot or recognize its own configuration for us to get at the files.
Don’t risk your data — let’s recover it
Free diagnostics, no recovery no fee. Mail it in from anywhere in the US.