My old Synology RS815+ died. Power light flashing, alert light flashing, status light dead, no network. Fans running, drives detected, no beep. The kind of failure where the box is telling me it's done.
A replacement is over £800. I'm not a hardware technician. I've never repaired a motherboard. Normally this is where it goes in the bin and I go shopping.
This time I took photos and went through it step by step with AI. Ten minutes, one fault, and then a stranger's forum post from years ago with the exact fix. One 100 Ω resistor. My mate Peter soldered it. The Synology is back.
Here's how it actually went, so the next person standing over a bin can find it.
The symptoms
Power LED flashing. Alert LED flashing. Status LED completely off. HDD LEDs on, drives detected. No LAN link at all. No beep on power-up. Fans normal.
What I did, step by step
I photographed the front panel and described the lights exactly as they were. Then I did what it suggested, one thing at a time, and sent a photo after each step.
Disconnect the LAN cable. Power on. Any change? No.
Pull all the drives. Power on again. Same lights. So it wasn't the drives or the array.
Wait five minutes with it on. Does the status light ever come up? It didn't. So the system wasn't booting at all, not just booting slowly.
Check the fans and listen for the beep. Fans fine, no beep. The board was getting power but never reaching the point where it announces itself.
That's four steps and ten minutes, and it narrowed everything to one place: the board itself, somewhere in the power-on stage, not the drives, not the network, not the PSU.
The find
Once it was narrowed that far, the search got specific: this model, these exact lights, no boot. And there it was. Someone, years ago, had the same failure on the same model and wrote it up properly. Photos, the location on the board, the part. A single 100 Ω resistor that had failed.
That's the resistor, soldered in, arrow on the spot. Peter did the soldering. Steady hands, not mine. The part cost less than a coffee.
Result
Green lights. Network back. Running like nothing happened.
What I'd tell myself before starting
Photograph everything before touching anything. Describe the lights exactly, not roughly. Do one step at a time and report back honestly, including "no change". The value isn't that the AI knew the answer. It didn't. The value is that it kept me methodical for ten minutes, and methodical is what found the stranger's post.
A few years ago this was a lost evening of forums and guessing, if I'd found it at all. I'm not an AI expert. I just describe the problem, send a photo, and follow the next step.
And to whoever wrote that post years ago: thank you. Somewhere down the line it landed with someone standing over a bin. It landed with me.