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I’d avoid putting both old drives into the new unit right away. Start with just one disk and see if the new NAS can detect the existing volume. Synology systems are usually pretty good at importing drives from older models, especially when moving between similar setups like this.
Since you were running RAID 1, you’re in a pretty good position. Each drive should contain a full copy of your data. The safest option is to insert one of the drives directly into the new Synology DS224+ and let DSM recognize it. Just be very careful during setup and avoid anything that says “initialize” or “format.”
If the data is important, I’d honestly avoid too much trial and error. A freezing drive can degrade quickly and make recovery harder the more you stress it. Cloning with error handling is your best DIY shot, but if that fails, professional recovery might be the safer route—especially for RAID setups where rebuild attempts can overwrite critical metadata.
The “entire thing is buggered” advice is a bit of an exaggeration. RAID is designed to handle failures, but a partially failing drive (freezing, not fully dead) is actually worse than a completely failed one. It can cause timeouts and instability. If possible, take the bad drive offline and work on cloning it separately rather than keeping it in the live array.
Cloning a failing RAID drive can work, but you have to approach it carefully. A standard clone might fail if the disk keeps freezing. You’d want to use something like ddrescue that can skip bad sectors and come back later. Also, make sure you clone it to a drive of equal or larger size. Once cloned, you can try rebuilding the array with the replacement.
It’s not automatically “game over” if one drive in a RAID setup starts freezing. It really depends on the RAID level you’re using. For example, RAID 1 or RAID 5 can usually tolerate a failed drive. The bigger risk is that a freezing drive can slow down or hang the entire array, which makes recovery trickier. Cloning is possible, but you’d need to use a tool that can handle bad sectors and doesn’t stop on read errors.
You’re actually in a better spot than it might feel right now. This kind of issue—where a RAID suddenly shows up as RAW after being unplugged—is usually down to corrupted file system or RAID metadata, not the drives themselves failing. That means your data is often still there, just not being read properly. The key thing now is to avoid doing anything that could overwrite or confuse the RAID further—like initializing it, formatting it, or trying random rebuild attempts.
If the files are important, it’s worth going straight to a professional recovery lab like WeRecoverData or Flashback Data. These guys deal with RAID setups all the time and can usually piece things back together even when the structure is damaged. Overall, this isn’t a worst-case scenario—you’ve got a solid chance of recovery as long as you handle the next steps carefully.
At this point, the smartest move isn’t to stress over rebuilding your old setup exactly the way it was. You’ve actually come out of this in pretty good shape—your RAID is intact, your data is safe, and your PBS backups are there. That’s what really matters. Instead of trying to recreate every logical volume and thin pool from memory, it’s much simpler (and safer) to treat this like a clean Proxmox install. Unlock your RAID, mount it, reconnect your PBS datastore, and restore your VM—that process will bring back most of what you need automatically. Losing /etc/pve might feel like a big deal, but in practice, it’s not a blocker since configs can be rebuilt or restored along the way. Think of it less as rebuilding from scratch and more as setting things up fresh and then pulling your system back in from backups. It’s quicker, cleaner, and avoids a lot of unnecessary headaches.
This doesn’t seem like a hardware problem at all—it’s more likely a software or system-level conflict. Since the issue came back even after a fresh install, especially when installing things like Adobe Creative Cloud and earlier with WSL, it suggests something is interfering with how Windows boots. Both of these can make deep changes to the system, like adding drivers or enabling virtualization features, and if those don’t play nicely together, Windows can fail to start altogether. The safest way to avoid this is to make sure all drivers and BIOS updates from Dell are installed first, avoid enabling virtualization features until everything is stable, and install major software step by step while creating restore points along the way. In short, it’s not your laptop failing—it’s Windows getting tripped up by a conflict during startup.
Tools like Stellar Data Recovery or Photorec work well on APFS drives. They scan the raw disk and try to rebuild deleted files.
Any specific tool?
Happens more than you think. Next step: stop using that drive immediately. If possible, don’t install anything on it. Use another Mac or external drive to run recovery software.
No backup… I don’t know what I was thinking….
Depends on how much new data got written. First, check the Time Machine backup if you have it on. That’s the cleanest restore..
A sudden power cut can definitely cause a RAID 1 array to go into a degraded state even if both drives are physically fine. It’s often a sync or metadata issue rather than actual disk failure. Before retrying the repair, try rebooting the NAS again and check system logs to see why the rebuild is timing out.