Synology motherboard failure

A motherboard failure is classified as a hardware failure. Often, when the motherboard breaks down, you simply stop seeing your Synology device in the list of available devices. However, there are cases when the motherboard starts to glitch in strange ways, confusing the user and making the situation much worse than it was originally. For example, on one of the forums we read a story about how Synology first reported that one of the disks was broken and needed to be replaced, which the user began to do, but even before the rebuild was completed, he received a message that the other disk was also broken, the user replaced it, but the loss of 2 disks was not covered by the redundancy of the array, so data recovery was not possible. And in the end, after contacting Synology technical support, it turned out that the problem was in the motherboard, and all the disks were absolutely healthy. Thus, we can conclude that for any strange behavior of your device, you should suspect the motherboard as the cause of the malfunction.

You can understand that the motherboard is broken by following some steps that are described on the official page from Synology.

If your Synology is under warranty, the smartest thing to do is to contact Synology's warranty department. They will most likely either fix the motherboard or provide you with a new device. However, there are several difficulties here:

1. Synology will not offer you any same-day replacement options, which means you will not have access to the data stored on Synology for some (often long) time.
2. Not always, a new Synology device or a repaired mother recognizes the original disks. Very often, when connecting disks, a new device will offer you to create a new array. If you agree to this, you will lose your data.

Conclusion: both if the motherboard is not under warranty, and in a warranty case, it is safest to first restore the data, and only then fix the broken motherboard.

How to recover data if Synology motherboard is failed?

1. Remove the drives from your Synology and connect them to the computer. It is recommended to connect the drives directly to the computer motherboard using a SATA connection. If there are not enough ports, then you can connect some drives using USB-to-SATA adapters.
2. Download, install and run the ReclaiMe File Recovery software, which can recover data from Synology devices.
3. In the list of ReclaiMe devices, select a volume from Synology, which will be located either under the Linux LVM or BTRFS sections.

4. Start scanning by clicking the Start button.
5. Wait until you receive a message that “Initial scan is completed” and start checking the recovered data. If some data is not yet available, or the files are not displayed correctly in Preview, then continue scanning by clicking the Resume button. If the size of the recovered files is as expected and the files are displayed correctly in the Preview window, you may not continue scanning.

6. Prepare additional storage where you will copy the recovered data. Its volume should be equal to the volume of data, rather than the volume of the entire array.
7. Buy an Ultimate license key and copy the recovered data.

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