Synology DS918+ Bricked / Blue LED of death. 

A dual bios is a good solution, amazing they don't have it on a crucial device like this.

Nice job! I would have never suspected a corrupted BIOS, and having to desolder it is quite off-putting. Well, another lesson learned... and that's always use a UPS :D

I think as someone has already mentioned, a dual bios should be the norm and the ability to boot into repair mode even by a USB device would be better than nothing. Great video, really enjoyed it and I am glad you were able to access your data again.

I really appreciate your mix of old stuff and new stuff in your videos on this channel. Keep up the excellent work!

This was very impressive work. This is a video that I will remember for years to come!! Thank you for taking us along for the ride.

Fantastic. So well done. Synology should watch this video and send you a new NAS for your expert fix as a thank you. Wish I could give you a million thumbs up. Just great!

My 1515+ died, and after some research I found a common problem with those units. I had to replace a transistor and add a resistor, but it is up and running again! Your video gives me faith in trying to solve problems rather than dumping and buying new. I hope it does the same for others.

Phew ... relaxing music whilst enter lair of the (un) boot dragon! Excellent structured approach to fix. Well done.

Wow, I take my hat off to you sir, a masterclass in debugging.

Congratulations on fixin your NAS!! Very nice diagnostic :)

nice troubleshooting example, really appreciate seeing items other than consoles or comps getting diag'd and fixed like this - thanks very much.

Nice repair! As cool stuff Synology builds, ultimately this is why I decided to build my own NAS out with a 2 core, old AMD APU board. Even if the board fries, I can just pop in any old replacement and the data should be fine.

Congratulations!!!! Happy to see you didn't lose your NAS.

This was amazing, great repair!

Well done Davy, good repair video fro DS918+ owners. You need to have the necessary skills to troubleshoot & also have the chip baker tools to be able to 'reflash' the chip....and I don't think many of us out here have ever experienced doing this kind of operation.

Glad to see you back I've missed your videos always love learning from

Impressive repair. Great investigative approach. I only just replaced my old failing UPS powering my DS918+. As it turns out I am writing this comment atm during a power outage, happy to have dodged a possible bullet, phew!

One of the best videos tou made.Really enjoyed it.

Great vid! I had something similar after a powercut and luckily for me the power adapter gave up. Replaced it with a 3rd party one and it was up and running again. Now to rebuild my cache for the 2nd time, expensive SSD lasts much longer than cheap SSD in my experience with the 918+ (both Samsung SSD too)

WOW I am impressed with your prowess and luck there. I had a similar issue with another Synology (RS816). Mine it just decided to stop working. No power issues just died. I changed the power supply and changed a few of the capacitors on the PCB to no avail. I sold it for scraps on eBay ($30). You are right Synology could have a bit more compassion with people in our kind of predicament. No repair or any suggestion to help out other than to buy a new one.

Nice just fixed a DS1815+, your video was suggested. and I need to say I am happy that i seen it 😀, this gives me some more inside on how the synology is build. The 100 ohm fix for the ds1815+ fixed my synology but a corrupted bios is something i would never think of.

Impressive repairing skills displayed here. I love what Synology is doing in general. Nothing gets close to it but they have their issues indeed. I'd never run one without an UPS ... The problem you encountered is very rare, but it is common for Synology NAS to become "read only" (in best case) after an outage or to become unable to mount your volumes. It is easy to repair without data loss with the right command, but the check/rebuild will run for >24hrs, which is not good for your stress level ;-) Just one remark .... Never use the built-in admin account. First thing you should do after setting up a Syno is to create yourself one or two other admin accounts named differently and disable that one forever. Well know NAS brands are notorious targets for cryptolockers and old DSM versions had vulnerabilities that were specifically targeted. Having that admin account disabled and an up to date DSM already defeats 99% of the exploits.

My 412+ has same issues. This video is so amazing. I'll try this as soon as possible.

Nice video. I have a DS918+ myself and I was thinking about cleaning it out of dust and do a little physical maintenance. I just wanted to take a peek and see what I was thowing myself out into.

Fantastic work - well done !!

It's a pleasure to watch your videos😁

Power supply went on my Synology NAS. It looked very much like yours when it would turn on, except that turning it on a few times actually got it to boot. Mine also went out after a power failed. Replaced the power supply and now it works great again. (Not a big deal. It uses the same PS as some servers.) I don't especially mind that it had a fault as this NAS was 11 years old. Its now serving as my backup NAS backing up a new NAS. Now if it had been a chip that had gone out, I don't think I'd have fixed it. Subscribed.

So glad you were able to get it fixed! :) Good job!

It happened with one of my client's QNAP. The QNAP was running on an online UPS, so there was no power supply issue....the box went bad on its own. And QNAP out of warranty service dept. asked for a king's ransom to change the motherboard or the entire box itself. It took us a few weeks to source a few chips and resistors and restore the QNAP's firmware for 1/10 the price. Then another week to figure out how to upgrade it to the latest version of firmware from scratch. Both QNAP and Synology charge a bomb for parts replacement in India. When I added the entire story to a prominent QNAP forum...their official tech support incharge felt the burn and I did give my honest feedback to the country manager. But they are still quite shameless and don't want to admit their policies are meant to fleece the gullible customer.

That was a brave fix. So glad it was successful.

One company I was working with had a bunch of these things (about 12, I think) - they had 3 of them fail with that blinking blue light in a week. The interesting thing is that as a result of this they decided to replace them all with a different vendor, and I ended up with 2 of the old units - which is still working without any problems.

Fantastic video and repair.

Great job on unbricking it. I have my synology NAS Set up with a second synology NAS that’s only job is to back up the primary Nas. I run both on separate battery back up UPS’s. Hopefully I will never need to use the back up. Thanks again for the video

My same NAS suffered the same problem. However, it is not easy for me to copy your way to correct it. I am thinking to build my own NAS with one of my old PC. Thanks for your sharing.

simply amazing. I'm a programmer & wouldn't attempt this type of work to actually tear it apart & desolder the bios chip & manually edit it with a hex editor & reprogram it is simply amazing. I guess the lesson here for people that couldn't do this type of work (most) would be to make sure you have a UPS on your NAS. I definitely do.

It's amazing you knew how to fix the issue. In order to prevent this, you should have the NAS on a UPS though 🙃

Great work, thank you for showing this.

Well done mate. Excellent video.

Great job finding and fixing the problem. Saved some tech going to landfill or recycling. Subbed to your channel.

Nice one! I guess I'd start off with connecting the drives to a linux box to see what's there. Usually it's mdraid, after all, so it shouldn't be too hard to get out, but them, you'll need the space to back it up etc. This is one of the reasons I tend to stick to home-grown servers with mdraid (or something) instead of something fancy ;)

Found this very interesting, thank you!

Amazing, good investigative work! Add a UPS and be sure to snapshot to an external drive along with the C2 backup as a good off-site option.

To call this a chance find would be rude. That was sheer skill! And thanks for the informative and entertaining video. Good job! What was lucky though is that Synology stores the bios/system image as a plain file(with header) and not encrypted with any strange routine... which is usually the norm. Also that none of the other many components was defective ... That was lucky. :)) Don't forget the backups, as NAS (even in a mirrored configuration) is NO Backup.

well done...soo interesting to look at

Thanks for posting this video. I might use this to figure out how to replace the fans in my DS918+ as they're getting a bit loud and I'd like to throw some Noctuas in there.

Great troubleshooting there!

That was impressive, thanks for sharing 👍

Great CPR you did to your NAS

Your skills are impressive my good man ... great job !!! Synology should watch and learn ... We all know they won't ... but one can hope ;)

I have a DS918+, I watched this video and now I'm back to looking online for a compatible UPS 😲 I was looking at some last year but, had a hard time finding one that is on Synology's compatibility list for this model AND is a good brand with good reviews and is a good price and a good fit for my network setup/physical limitations.

Nicely done!

Nice job fixing it, certainly not something I would have been able to do!

Bravo! Simply impressive!

Great detective work!

Speaking of Synology, I got a DS412+ that was broken -- whenever it tried to load firmware it thought it was a completely different unit and thus it downloaded a wrong firmware. I managed to load the GRUB that's on the built-in flash drive into IDA and somehow found undocumented (d'uh) argument that forces specific model to the kernel/OS... And it has been working ever since :) no clue where the actual model is stored, BIOS (checked build date) matches the one from DS412+.

Great video. I had an issue a while back with my DS918+ although that was virus related. Since then I now back up regularly to an external drive, plus via a Cloud service as another layer of protection but as you say you shouldnt have to buy a new NAS for this type of failure.

Impressive! And congrats!

I like how the heatsink suddenly became a speaker. Hallmark of someone who knows what they're talking about.

Nice fix. I would have trust issues but still great troubleshooting.

Well diagnosed.. good Job.

holy smokes. what a deep dive. still hoping, that this will not happening to me tho. Nice vid man, thanks for sharing. 👍

I have no skillset to do what you have done. Very impressive.

Thank you so much "Retro". Really informative video. I have a DS920+ now in its 2nd yr - working really well. But I've often wondered - what do I do if I have a problem with the Unit? I replaced one hard drive that failed. Simple enough. But a problem with the box is scary to contemplate. As you say, very disappointing that Synology appears to not to have thought this through. Or maybe they have and are happy for clients to go buy a new box when they have problems with it. I'm sure a few of us would be very grateful if you could take the time to attach a note outlining to diagnostic process and points us to the basics of using the serial port interface. Anyway. Many thanks. Great work. Synology should thank you.

I had a similar problem with a powerline wifi adapter. I found the "binwalk" utility really helpful for analyzing the the segments of the firmware and reconstructing it. (There where some device specific calibration data and botloader, that weren't included in the firmware). In my case it was caused by a bad flash chip, with a few unwritable bytes, so I hat to replace it too. And I would be interested how the sotware you were using to compare the firmware is called.

This is great. Thanks. Mine just died after an accidental power off... I'm ordering a new power supply (which I've read is a possible problem... my light doesn't steadily blink, just blinks once or twice then turns off, no fans.) and if the power supply doesn't do it, I may have to get another one. Thanks again for this!!

Good save!

Amazing fix! I have a DS1817+ and it plays on my mind every day. It's predecessor, the 1815+ was one that was notorious for bricking itself and I worry that the issue was not solved before the design of its replacement. Mine is about five years old so it is about the time for it to give up. I have it, and the router, on a UPS so it should be getting the cleanest, most stable power and connection I can feed it. I just backup everything that I don't want to lose in other places, but it is not viable to do that for everything. I'd probably buy another one. Building my own is possible, I have enough parts here to do it, but the Synology software is really good. It is nice that you can just put the disks into another box and it just works again.

Well done!

Great video, very informative......

I'm glad my DS212 is running just fine for 10 years now :) I only boot it up every day to do backups, though. It's not running 24/7.

Great Job. Congratulation. I had a similar issue with an Cherry Wireless Desktop keyboard, where I must reflash the USB Tranceiver Stick. Thanks god I have more than one set of these desktop/mouse sets and I could clone the 24W02 EEPROM.

Your skills saved you. This is NOT a normal scenario with other users.

Glad you got your data back! I will never use synology after discovering truenas and being able to choose your hardware. Synology makes a good product, but my lord if they ever have a hardware issue you're in a world of hurt.

This is normal for synology, I have had a bunch fail. Thanks for the info, I will try this out on one of the ones that died.

Great video!

Excellent video! I do agree that Synology should make the NAS more robust on the hardware to survive power outage. But an OS is never happy when power suddenly drops out. My advice to always use a UPS in combination with your NAS. This prevents a lot of these power outage issues.

Interesting, I have the same issue on one of mine, a DS218 and ended up buying a new one. I don't really have the tools nor the skills to effect a repair like this. I'm overall very happy with Synology and have 8-9 of them. I've had a better experience with Synology than I have with QNAP where I had a 6-bay one die 2 weeks before it's warranty ran out and it's replacement die 2 months after it ran out. Great job on yours though.

I have a DS212 with 2x 4TB drives (in mirror). I only recently put it in service, but I keep a full backup on a RAID. I just don't trust the thing. The original owner who gave it to me stated that it had gotten slower and slower after every update it received. I had to manually disable a bunch of bloat with putty/ssh to get it back to its original performance. Anyway, great fix! I messed with bios flashing before, but this is next level.

Very impressive fix. Way beyond the average user I suspect (i.e. me!)

Well done again!

100% agreed on the fact that having to go through this thorough of a fix is a little much for something so expensive. Synology needs to be better in this regard.

This was awesome

Nice work!

Dual bios is a must even though an UPS comes to mind to protect against power cuts and general power fluctuations :)

Wow excellent work

Good Job !

I think they could at least come up with a firmware recovery option. A lot of PC motherboards have this. Just plug in a USB stick containing the latest firmware downloaded from the manufacturer's website, and possibly push a button. That's pretty much how my PC motherboard does it. Also, I had an old Pioneer VSX 808 home cinema amp effectively killed by a power cut. It was nearly 13 years old, which is a good age for consumer electronics now. One day, I was happily using it, then the power started browning out. Then it was cut for several hours. When it came back, it was still browning out. I did unplug the amp when the power went, but the damage was already done. It took a couple of attempts, but I managed to get the amp switched on. It had lost all it's settings, so I went through setting everything up again. When I'd finished, and was using it, it seemed fine. This happened again and again over the next couple of months, getting worse and worse. Eventually, I had to dump the amp. Partly because of this, and partly because due to other things, I no longer really had the room for a home cinema system. Still don't really. Perhaps when I get an extension built.

Nice repair and great video! 👍 I wonder, why Synology didn't put backup BIOS IC on so expensive device.. 🤔 Expensive PC mainboards have that option..

Excellent job fixing it, I'm kinda suprised you have a prebuilt NAS I would have thought you would have built your own.

Finding the bios on their web site is no problem. Obtaining the equipment to read/write to various EE proms is not an issue BUT Bit Banging that firmware can be an issue for many individuals. We used to do a lot of this bit banging on some Motorola radios many many years ago and many times there were forums that had posted the mods to the original firmware so one did not have to spend hours changing data line by line only to have to create the correct check sum so the radio could boot up properly. Easier to use the correct motherboard with the proper software and do a DIY NAS. You might not get the fancy case and removable drives but you will wind up with something that is easily repairable. A very interesting and thought provoking issue. Interesting comments and suggestions as well.

I've used Synology for a lot, after my Lacie failed for the 3rd time and was no more in warranty. By a few years (at home), I now prefer to use a QNAP product, instead. It seems a bit more robust, although a true jack of all trades is to get your hands dirty and going with a DIY solution. Not for everyone, but it works better (at my job).

I can appreciate the idea of an all in one NAS, but this is a good example of why I opted for a recycled tiny Optiplex.

Cool it can be fixed the way you showed us

Молодец! Хорошо починил синолоджи!

I had a broken DS415+ with the well known Intel Atom bug, I had to solder a 100 Ohm resistor to a certain spot on the mainboard and since then it runs and keeps running, even to this day. But that reminded me: Always have a backup, and in my case: I have a backup on a different media, and I have a cold-standby NAS, a DS415play just to be on the safe side

This is absolutely stellar! 👍

Amazing!

There is a good reason for ICT fixtures to use various pins for contacting onto the test pads on the PCB. Also, programming is via BSC (Boundary Scan), because ICT is not ideal for that. ICT is good for detecting electrical failures on the PCB and that's what it was designed to do.

Im So happy that you was able to fix this, But it has Also Scared me as I have them same model and roughly about the same time length, no warrenty now,, even though youve explained how to fix this, i wouldnt know how to do it, as that not my strong field.. anyway awesome video my dude

I've had a DS918+ die suddenly, in a similar way. Had another solution, but when I looked into the NAS failure, symptoms looked like the infamous "Low Pin Count" interface affecting some Celeron CPU models. When I later was going in to try to fix it (found a suggestion in a RU-vid video), the machine was able to boot again, without issues.