When shared storage stumbles, every server leaning on it goes down together. We reconstruct SAN estates — LUNs offline, pools corrupted, VMFS datastores refusing to mount — for businesses and IT providers across York and North Yorkshire, from single shelves to multi-shelf arrays, with enterprise server work treated as core bench trade rather than an occasional adventure.
Every san job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any san is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Enterprise shelves shed drives by the handful, not the unit. Every casualty gets solo repair and imaging before group mathematics resumes.
The block device under your servers has gone. It gets rebuilt upward — pool metadata first, then RAID groups, strictly in sequence.
The block-to-volume map failed. We reconstruct it from the raw on-disk structures it was describing all along.
Management plane dead mid-flash; data motionless behind it. Work proceeds straight against the drives.
Pairs die together more readily than the datasheet suggested. Recovery goes drive-direct, which never reads datasheets anyway.
The VMware layer collapses first. Datastores get parsed out, then every VMDK is extracted and mended individually.
Seconds to do, days to regret. What survives depends on writes since — freeze the platform and the arithmetic improves.
One broken link fells every dependent volume. The chain is re-forged at image level, link after link.
Promised capacity exceeding owned capacity corrupts every thin volume drawing on the pool. Rebuilt from images with honest accounting restored.
Expired cache batteries and one outage leave parity contradicting data across a whole group. At image level the contradiction resolves affordably.
NetApp aggregates and EMC pools forget where their volumes live. Reconstruction climbs from RAID groups upward until they remember.
520, 524 and 528-byte formats blunt desktop tooling by design. Our lab fabric reads them natively, no improvised adapters.
HPE's small-business staple lands here with vDisk structures torn. A reconstruction this workshop has rehearsed to boredom.
V3700s and V5000s drop extents after power events. We remap them from the drives, extent by patient extent.
The box lost the target definition; the volume behind it rarely dies with it. Extracted and re-presented over honest plumbing.
Corrupt the index and every reference fails simultaneously. Rebuilt until shared blocks resolve correctly again.
Both controllers wrote independently through a botched handover. The divergent histories reconcile at image level, timestamped and audited.
Arrays long past end-of-support fail without an official path. The lab path never expires — data doesn't read contracts.
Replacements on mismatched firmware misbehave inside elderly groups. Stabilise, image, then reconstruct — in that order.
Masking or fabric edits blind every host at once while volumes sit healthy. The mapping is rebuilt and handed back to its owners.
Same-lot drives hitting an hours-counter firmware defect fail within days of each other — a known industry embarrassment. We image the survivors at speed before they join in.
Nearline SATA behind SAS interposer boards fails at the interposer more often than the drive. We bypass the adapters and image bare.
When the SSD tier dies, every tiered volume loses its most active blocks. Cold tiers plus tiering metadata rebuild what the quick layer dropped.
A zoning slip minus a cluster file system equals interleaved corruption. We separate the two write histories from images, operation by operation.
Service processor dead, credentials retired with a contractor. The array won't converse; the drives have no such scruples. Extraction proceeds passwordless.
A SAN is a tower of abstractions — drives in RAID groups, groups pooled, pools carved into LUNs, file systems and hypervisor datastores on the top floor. Recovery climbs down and back up in order: image the drives, stand the RAID groups up, reconstruct pool metadata, lift the LUNs, then open the VMs and databases inside. Dell EMC, HPE MSA and EVA, NetApp, IBM and Fujitsu are all familiar hardware, and NDAs and change-control paperwork slot into the process without ceremony.
No business wants raw blocks back — it wants the three machines that run everything online again. So datastores are mounted from the rebuilt LUNs, VMDK and VHDX files come out for repair, and named SQL or Exchange workloads move to the front, letting operations restart while the remaining terabytes copy in the background. It's triage, practised calmly.
SAN recovery demands enterprise plumbing alongside recovery skill; the workshop stocks both in depth:
Shelves and drives connect over our own FC, SAS and iSCSI infrastructure — the odd sector sizes of enterprise stock included.
Whole RAID groups captured side by side, once any casualty drive has completed its visit to the PC-3000 benches.
Vendor metadata rebuilt in its natural order: groups, then pools, then LUNs, then whatever file systems ride above.
Restored LUNs present their datastores again; each virtual disk is then lifted clear and repaired on its own merits.
Named SQL Server and Exchange workloads get verified early and prioritised, so the services that matter restart soonest.
Every original — drive or shelf — remains read-only from arrival until the day it ships home.
Strange badges rarely mean strange hardware — enterprise vendors rebadge a shared parts bin endlessly, and this workshop has met most of the bin twice. Pools missing their maps rebuild from the RAID groups upward; twin controller deaths just route the work drive-direct; eccentric sector sizes read natively on the lab fabric instead of arguing with desktop adapters. Ship the labelled drives; the shelf can keep its rack bolts.
Before anything leaves the rack, tag each drive with its shelf and slot — enterprise layouts punish guesswork about position. Only the tagged drives make the journey (photograph the setup first); shelves and controllers never leave site.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.