A Netgear SC101 storage unit running two disks as a RAID 1 mirror went offline during a firmware update and never came back. The disks were fine; the device that understood them was not. We imaged both members and rebuilt the SC101's proprietary layout to recover the data.
The SC101 had quietly mirrored two disks for years when a firmware update stalled and left the unit dead — no shares, no access, nothing on the network. The two drives inside were physically healthy, but the appliance that knew how to present them had been left in a broken state by the interrupted update. With the only copy of the data locked inside a device that would no longer boot, the disks were removed and brought in.
Firmware is the appliance's own operating software. Interrupt an update — a power blip, a timeout — and the device can be left half-written and unbootable, unable to assemble or present its own storage. The data on the disks is untouched, but it's stored in the appliance's particular way, and without a working appliance to interpret it, an ordinary computer sees only unreadable disks. The SC101 compounds this by using a proprietary scheme rather than a standard file system, so the layout has to be understood and reconstructed by hand.
Each disk was cloned sector by sector through a write blocker. Both read cleanly, as expected for a logical/firmware fault, and everything that followed was done on the images so the originals stayed frozen. Working from images also meant the two members could be compared against each other — useful on a mirror, where either copy can fill a gap in the other.
The SC101 doesn't lay data down as a normal partition and file system; it uses its own on-disk format across the mirrored pair. From the images, that structure was analysed — how the volume was described, how the mirror was organised, where the file data actually sat — and reassembled into a readable volume. Because it was a mirror, the healthy copy of any structure could be used wherever the other showed a gap, and the file system was then rebuilt so the folders and file names came back as they had been.
Files were opened across the recovered volume to confirm they were intact, then returned on a fresh drive. The failed firmware update was a reminder that appliances can brick themselves through no fault of the disks — and that a second copy of important data, kept off the appliance, is the thing that turns a dead unit into an inconvenience rather than a loss.
Hardware imager with write blocker · RAID 1 mirror reconstruction · proprietary on-disk layout analysis and file-system rebuild. Read-only imaging, all work in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually not. A failed update bricks the appliance, but the disks and their data are typically fine. We image the disks and rebuild the storage layout independently of the broken device, so the data can be recovered even when the unit won't boot.
Yes — including proprietary layouts like the SC101's that ordinary computers can't read. We reconstruct the on-disk structure by hand from images of the disks.
Yes, send both, labelled with their order. On a mirror, having both copies lets us fill any gap in one from the other for the most complete result.