A Kirkintilloch photography studio ran its archive on a two-bay Netgear ReadyNAS in RAID 0 — all speed, no spare. During a routine firmware update the street lost power, and the box came back as a boot loop: lights cycling, volume gone, web page unreachable, and a decade of shoots somewhere behind the blinking.
The studio did the right things in the right order: no factory reset, no reinstall-firmware option from the boot menu, no pulling disks to try in a USB dock. The whole unit came in as it stood. That restraint matters enormously here, because every rescue option a boot-looping NAS offers involves writing to the very disks that need preserving — and on RAID 0, with zero redundancy, there is no second copy to fall back on.
On the bench the picture was cleaner than the blinking suggested. The power cut had landed mid-write on the NAS’s own firmware, leaving the operating system half-old, half-new — hence the loop. The two data disks, though, were mechanically perfect and hadn’t been touched by the update at all. The volume wasn’t damaged; it was orphaned. Its only reader was in a coma, and reviving that reader risked more than replacing it.
Both disks were imaged read-only and the ReadyNAS itself was retired from the story. From the images, the RAID 0 stripe order and stripe size were confirmed, the pair interleaved back into a single volume, and the ext filesystem inside mounted from the reconstruction. Ten years of RAW files and client galleries were extracted and verified against the folder tree — the box that had failed them never got another chance to.
Everything came back, delivered on a pair of fresh drives at the from-£500 + VAT multi-disk band fixed in writing after the free look. And one honest footnote travelled with it: RAID 0 doubles your speed by making two disks share every file, which also means either disk — or one interrupted firmware flash — can take the lot down. It’s a fine working format and a terrible archive. The studio’s new setup mirrors; the old one taught why.
Every recovery option a broken NAS offers writes to your disks. Power it off, send the unit or the drives in bay order, and the volume gets rebuilt from images instead — from £500 + VAT, diagnosed free, quoted in writing first.