When shared storage fails, everything attached to it goes down with it. We recover SAN environments — failed LUNs, corrupted VMFS volumes, broken storage pools — for businesses and IT providers across Surrey and west London.
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 free diagnostic page.
Every san job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Enterprise shelves lose members in clusters — each drive is recovered and imaged individually first.
The block device your servers depended on vanishes; it's rebuilt from the pool metadata upward.
The map of how blocks form LUNs breaks — reconstruction works from the raw structures.
Updates that brick controller pairs strand healthy data behind dead management.
Dual-controller redundancy dies together more often than the brochures admit — recovery goes drive-direct.
The VMware layer breaks above healthy LUNs; datastores and VMDKs are parsed and repaired.
Provisioning mistakes happen fast; recovery depends on how much was written after.
Snapshot-dependent volumes collapse when a link corrupts — chains are re-stitched at image level.
Pools that ran out of real blocks corrupt everything thin on them.
Power events with dead cache batteries leave parity and data out of step across the group.
A failed NetApp aggregate or Dell EMC pool loses its LUN map — rebuilt from the raw RAID-group structures upward.
Enterprise drives formatted to 520/528-byte sectors confuse standard tools — they're imaged natively on the SAN fabric.
SANs stack complexity: physical drives in RAID groups, pools carved into LUNs, and file systems or hypervisor datastores layered on top — commonly Dell EMC, HP MSA/EVA, IBM, NetApp or Fujitsu hardware. Recovery works back down that stack in reverse: image the physical drives, rebuild the RAID groups, reconstruct the pool metadata, then extract the LUNs and the virtual machines or databases inside them. We regularly partner with in-house IT teams and MSPs, and can work to your change-control and confidentiality requirements.
Most SAN jobs are really VM jobs — the client needs three critical servers back, not a petabyte of raw blocks. We pull VMDK/VHDX files out of rebuilt datastores, repair them where needed, and can prioritise specific databases (SQL, Exchange) so the business is running again before the full recovery is even finished.
SAN work needs the connectivity as much as the recovery stack:
HBAs and interposers to attach enterprise shelves and drives natively, including 520/524/528-byte sector formats.
Whole RAID groups imaged simultaneously; failed members repaired on the PC-3000 bench first.
Vendor metadata parsed and rebuilt — RAID groups → pools → LUNs → file systems, in that order.
Datastores mounted from reconstructed LUNs; virtual disks extracted and repaired individually.
SQL Server, Exchange and similar workloads verified and prioritised so critical services restart first.
Every original drive and shelf is read-only from arrival to hand-back.
If your platform isn't listed, it's still likely familiar — enterprise storage recycles the same building blocks under different badges. A failed NetApp aggregate or Dell EMC pool loses its LUN map, which we rebuild from the raw RAID groups upward; Fujitsu ETERNUS and HPE MSA shelves sometimes lose both controllers together, so recovery goes drive-direct; and enterprise disks formatted to 520/528-byte sectors are imaged natively rather than fought with standard tools.
Remove and clearly label every drive with its shelf and slot position before sending — enterprise arrays depend on exact drive order and layout. Send the labelled drives (photos of the original configuration help); the shelves and controllers can 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 Guildford 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.