Ebbw Vale and NP23 · covered
Data recovery in Ebbw Vale. What replaced the steelworks runs on disks.
Ebbw Vale made iron from 1778 and steel until July 2002, and in the 1930s and 40s the works here were the largest in Europe — the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built with steel off this valley floor. The site is now The Works: a hospital, a school, and the Coleg Gwent Learning Zone that holds every A-Level place in Blaenau Gwent. The Enterprise Zone spreads over eight more sites, Rassau to Rhyd-y-Blew, full of small firms with a single server and no copy anywhere else. Post it tracked to the Bristol lab; looking at it costs nothing.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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Five faults NP23 keeps sending us.
Not listed here? Try the triage →| What shows up | Why it lands here | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A NAS on an Enterprise Zone shop floor, not mounting | It holds the CAD, the CNC programs and the inspection log | Shut it down, number each disk by its bay, post them bare |
| The one office PC that gave out over a weekend | A unit on Rassau can keep the same machine going for years | We handle the data, IT the hardware |
| An external drive carrying the entire job archive | The one copy anyone ever made, and it lives in a van | More of these arrive than anything else |
| A mirrored pair that has been down to one disk | Nobody noticed the first drive drop out of the set | We image both disks before anyone attempts a rebuild |
| A laptop that started clicking after a knock on site | Machines that ride around in a van all week get dropped | Shut it down and keep it off; every restart costs you |
An Ebbw Vale job, from posting to return.
Four questions from NP23 and around.
Which parts of Blaenau Gwent are covered?
All of NP23, street by street: Beaufort, Rassau, Garnlydan, Willowtown, Victoria, Briery Hill, Waunlwyd and Cwm — the town runs about three miles from top to bottom. Tredegar in NP22, and Abertillery, Blaina and Llanhilleth in NP13, are covered on the same terms.
Our inspection records are on that array. Is the audit trail safe?
Nothing is ever written to your disks. Each one is imaged read-only, the work happens on the copies, and the originals come back exactly as they left. A fixed written price comes before anything starts, and at the end you get a checked list of what was recovered and what was not — the document an auditor will ask for.
Our NAS began a rebuild and it has hung. Pull the plug?
Yes, cut the power. Rebuilding drags every sector off the disks that are left, and that is precisely the workload a tired disk dies under, so a hung rebuild can end up worse than the original fault. Pull the disks, number them in bay order, and post the bare drives — the Bristol lab does not want the enclosure.
What is the right way to box up a drive for the post?
Take the movement out of it. An anti-static bag first, if there is one about; then padding pressed against all six faces, or the drive's original packaging if it survived. Post it tracked, insure it to full value, and add a printed shipping form to the box. The posting page runs through the whole thing, and we pay for the trip back.
Pages people often read next.
Ebbw Vale: pack it well, and post it to Bristol.
Do not switch it back on. Tell us what happened, and wait for the free diagnosis before agreeing to anything.