When shared storage stumbles, every server leaning on it falls together. We reconstruct SAN estates — LUNs offline, pools corrupted, VMFS datastores refusing to mount — for businesses and IT providers across Swindon and Wiltshire, from single shelves to multi-shelf arrays Enterprise server data recovery is core bench work here.
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 twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Enterprise shelves shed members in groups; each casualty gets individual repair and imaging before the group maths.
The block device your servers stood on vanishes — rebuilt upward from pool metadata and RAID groups.
The map from blocks to LUNs gives way — reconstructed from the raw on-disk structures it described.
Mid-update firmware death takes out the management plane; the data behind it never moved.
Redundant pairs die together more often than brochures admit — recovery then goes drive-direct.
The VMware layer collapses above healthy LUNs — datastores and their VMDKs get parsed out and repaired.
Provisioning slips take seconds; what survives depends on the writes since, so freeze the platform.
Break one link and all dependent volumes fall — the chain is sewn back together at capture level.
A pool that promised more than it owned corrupts every thin volume drawing on it.
Dead cache batteries plus a power event leave parity disagreeing with data right across the group — reconciled from images.
Aggregates on NetApp and pools on Dell EMC drop their LUN maps — reconstruction starts at the RAID groups and climbs.
Enterprise sector formats defeat desktop tools; the lab fabric images them natively.
HPE's small-business SAN staple arrives with vDisk metadata damage — well-practised reconstruction here.
IBM V3700 and V5000 pools drop extents after power events — remapped directly from the drives.
The box took the target definition with it, yet the volume behind that target generally survives for extraction.
When the dedupe index corrupts, every pointer breaks at once — rebuilt so the shared blocks resolve again.
Both controllers wrote independently during a botched failover — the divergent halves are reconciled at image level.
Kit long past vendor support fails with no official path left — the lab route stays open regardless of contract status.
Replacement drives on different firmware misbehave inside old groups — stabilised and imaged before reconstruction.
Fabric or zoning changes hide healthy LUNs from every server — the mapping is rebuilt and the volumes handed back.
A SAN is a tower of abstractions: physical drives in RAID groups, groups pooled, pools portioned out as LUNs, and file systems or hypervisor datastores occupying the top floor. Recovery climbs down and back up: image the drives, stand the RAID groups back up, reconstruct pool metadata, lift out the LUNs, then open the VMs and databases inside. Dell EMC, HPE MSA/EVA, NetApp, IBM and Fujitsu hardware are all familiar, and NDAs and change-control paperwork slot into the process without friction.
No business actually wants raw blocks — it wants the three machines that run everything back online. 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 so operations restart while the remaining terabytes are still copying in the background.
SAN work needs enterprise plumbing as much as recovery skill, and the lab keeps both on hand:
Enterprise shelves and drives attach over the lab's own FC, SAS and iSCSI plumbing, exotic 520/524/528 sector sizes included.
RAID groups are captured side by side once any casualty member has finished its visit to the PC-3000 rigs.
Vendor metadata parsed and rebuilt in sequence: RAID groups, then pools, then LUNs, then the file systems on top.
Rebuilt LUNs host their datastores again; each virtual disk is then lifted out and mended in turn.
Named SQL Server and Exchange workloads verified and moved to the front, so critical services restart first.
Originals — drives and shelves alike — remain read-only from booking-in until the day they go home.
An unfamiliar badge is rarely unfamiliar hardware — the enterprise market rebadges the same building blocks endlessly. Pools that mislay their LUN maps get rebuilt from the RAID groups up; a double controller failure just sends the work straight to the drives; and 520/528-byte enterprise sectoring images natively on the lab fabric instead of fighting desktop adapters.
Tag every drive with its shelf and slot positions before anything comes off the rack — enterprise layouts forgive nothing where order is concerned. The tagged drives are all that ships (photograph the configuration first); shelves and controllers remain 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 Oxford 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.