Unitiserve appears to be bricked

I should also say it’s wired through a 4 way switch which is connected to the router (ie. not directly to the router) but can’t see why that should matter. I’ve tested the ethernet cable and that’s OK.

The breaks after 20 secs does sound like a fault. Might be worth talking to Naim Support. A repair/service by Naim is quite expensive though.

But I’m not sure what you mean by standby mode. There isn’t a standby mode, so far as I know. If you touch the front panel logo for five seconds, it should flash and eventually shut down. To restart it from there you have to turn the back panel switch off and on again and then leave the logo alone while it starts up. It will flash more quickly as it starts up and then the logo should be lit solid. I think most users leave it on all the time, which is how it is designed to be used.

Best

David

David. There is a standby mode. You are not supposed to just power the Unitiserve down via the power switch at the back until you’ve put it in standby mode. ie. held the logo for 5 seconds until it goes out. Problem with mine is it doesn’t go out so I have to do a hard power down.

No you are misunderstanding me!

If you want to shut down the Unitiserve then you touch the logo until it starts to flash and then it shuts itself down. It’s not in standby, it’s off.

To get it to start up again, you turn the back panel switch to off and then immediately turn it on again. The logo will light up, flash rapidly and after a minute or so, be steadily lit.

It’s all in the user manual which you can find on line easily if you want. (I used to have a Unitiserve myself…)

Best

David

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There’s a CMOS battery in it which may have run down because it was appearing on the network and then disappearing again after a while. Now it wont boot at all so I’m going to try replacing that.

You can’t just change the battery, because you have to tell the Unitiserve to use Naim’s default settings. This has been covered several times in the forum.

You will need to have a keyboard with a PS2 or USB plug and a monitor with a VGA connector lead.

Then basically you change the battery taking all due electrostatic care appropriate to being inside a computer and with the monitor and keyboard connected, turn it on. It has been described in detail by NeilS and you could no doubt find that using the search facility on the forum, but as far as I recall, you enter the time and date when prompted and then navigate to loading the Naim default settings and save and exit.

Have a look at this thread: NeilS works for Naim so what he says is the real deal.

Best

David

Good advice David. I’m on it. The CR2032 is easy to source. I have loads of them. The PS2 mouse and laptop less so and even a VGA cable. Most of us binned that old tech years ago. Got a couple of adaptors and a VGA ordered so as soon as I get them I’m good to go. Thanks.

You don’t need a mouse. Just a keyboard.

Best

David

Can I use a USB keyboard and if so which of the USB sockets do I use?

If you read the thread I posted before you will see that someone confirmed that you can use a USB keyboard. I don’t know the answer to which USB socket, so you will have to try it and see which works (maybe it doesn’t matter!)
Best

David

Well I changed the battery and sourced a vga display and keyboard. No joy I’m afraid. It reports back a Disk Boot Failure and requests a System Disk so it looks like I’ve run out of options now. Naim will service it for £400 which seems a bit steep to me because it’s probably not worth that second hand. I doubt that Naim would be able to recover the music on the disk either. I think I may have to bin this Unitiserve and buy something a bit more up to date. Has anybody got any other ideas before I do that?

It sounds like you may have a hard disc failure, which would certainly mean a return to Salisbury I’m afraid.

I think a newly serviced US would be worth more than £400 on eBay in fact and Naim would try hard to recover your music for you too.

@NeilS any thoughts?

Best

David

Thanks for all the help and advice David. Yes it certainly sounds like a disk failure. Second time on this US I’m afraid. It sounds like it would be worth sending it back to Salisbury if and only if they could recover the music on it. I’m sceptical if this is possible though.

Hi Devil,

Defo hard drive failure I’m afraid. We will always do our best to recover all your music. It could just be the operating system partition that is corrupted & hopefully the music partition will be ok.
Obviously there are no guarantees.

Regards
Neil.

I was using it the other day and it would only play about 20 seconds of a song before it blipped out. I could see it on the network but left long enough it just disappeared so I kept rebooting it. Eventually it wouldn’t let me shut down properly from the logo and I ended up having to power it down on the switch. Eventually it just wouldn’t boot and the logo just flashed for England. If I send it in to be fixed what other work do you do for the £400? Seems a flat charge of £400 whether it goes in broken or just for a service.

No backup?!!!

I think for the most part yes but I haven’t backed it up in a while and was about to do so when I discovered the problem. I have a 16TB server that I back stuff onto. I have most of the stuff on CD but, as you know, trying to find what you’ve backed up and what you haven’t is the issue. I’m sure that I could have done automatic backups to my Synology had I bothered to get my backside in gear but I didn’t. I shall learn from this.

The auto backup on the Unitiserve works really well once set up. If you keep the US, I would certainly recommend using it. You then have a NAS with all the same music files on it, so you can run Asset or Minimserver on that, and have uninterrupted access to your music while you get the US fixed or replaced.

We tend to perform preventative maintenance, if your unit is over 5 years old, we will replace the motherboard caps, all other hardware updates will be done routinely.

Regards
Neil.

Hi Chris, is there any place i can read instructions on how to do this? many thanks/ken