Shared storage fails wholesale: one broken LUN and every server hanging off it goes quiet. We reconstruct SAN environments — offline LUNs, corrupted storage pools, unreadable VMFS datastores — and handle enterprise server data recovery for businesses and IT providers throughout Swansea and South Wales.
Free diagnostic on every san job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
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.
Every san job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Enterprise shelves lose members in groups; each one gets individual repair and imaging first.
The block device your servers lived on vanishes — rebuilt upward from the pool metadata.
The metadata mapping blocks into LUNs gives way — we rebuild it from the raw on-disk structures.
A firmware update kills the management plane while the data sits healthy behind it.
Redundant pairs fail together more often than the datasheets admit — recovery goes drive-direct.
VMware's layer breaks above intact LUNs; datastores and VMDKs are parsed and mended.
Provisioning slips happen in seconds; what's recoverable depends on the writes since.
One corrupt link collapses every dependent volume — chains are re-stitched at image level.
A pool that promised more than it had corrupts every thin volume riding on it.
A power hit landing on flat cache batteries knocks parity and data out of alignment across the group.
NetApp aggregates and Dell EMC pools lose their LUN maps — rebuilt from RAID-group level upward.
Enterprise sector formats confuse standard tools; drives are imaged natively on the lab fabric.
HPE's small-business SAN mainstay arrives with vDisk metadata damage — familiar reconstruction work.
IBM V3700 / V5000 pools lose extents after power events — remapped from the drives.
The target definition died with the box; the backing volume usually survives to be extracted.
A SAN is layers all the way down — physical drives in RAID groups, groups gathered into pools, pools sliced into LUNs, with file systems or hypervisor datastores riding highest. Recovery inverts the stack: drives imaged, RAID groups rebuilt, pool metadata reconstructed, LUNs extracted, and finally the VMs and databases inside them. Dell EMC, HPE MSA and EVA, IBM, NetApp and Fujitsu kit is familiar territory, and we'll slot into your change-control and NDA requirements without fuss.
Nobody actually wants a petabyte of blocks back — they want the three servers that run the company. Datastores are mounted from the reconstructed LUNs, VMDK and VHDX files extracted and repaired, and named SQL or Exchange workloads pushed to the front of the queue so the business restarts while the long tail of data is still copying.
SAN recovery needs enterprise connectivity as much as recovery tooling, and the lab has both:
HBAs and interposers attach enterprise shelves and drives natively — 520/524/528-byte sector formats included.
Complete RAID groups are captured in parallel, after any failed member has been through the PC-3000 bench.
Vendor metadata parsed and rebuilt in order: RAID groups, then pools, then LUNs, then file systems.
Datastores mount from the reconstructed LUNs; virtual disks are extracted and repaired one by one.
Named SQL Server and Exchange workloads are verified and moved to the head of the queue, putting critical services back first.
Every original drive and shelf stays read-only from arrival to hand-back.
An unlisted platform is rarely an unfamiliar one — enterprise vendors rebadge the same building blocks endlessly. Aggregates and pools that lose their LUN maps are rebuilt from RAID-group level upward, dual-controller failures send recovery drive-direct, and 520/528-byte enterprise formatting is imaged natively rather than fought with desktop tools.
Label each drive with its shelf and slot before it leaves the rack — enterprise layouts are unforgiving about order. The labelled drives are all that needs to travel (photograph the configuration first); shelves and controllers stay on site.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.