I had an electrical inspection in my property recently (tied accommodation) and on returning home the unitiserve badge was blinking away. I have done everything I can to bring it back to life but it’s not responding. Is it possible an electrical inspection could harm the unit? . The Unitistar is fine thankfully. How can I find out if it is a coincidence ,bad luck or damaged by outside influence? The chat all says it just needs a battery but I am not confident to delve inside. My local Naim dealer was no help and I understand sending it back to Naim will cost £00s. No, it’s not backed up. I could rip the CDs to the star of course but it’s a slow process.
I had a similar problem. Blinking light, changed the battery but still no solution. My US is sitting in its box in my loft. Too expensive to repair and, since, outmoded by newer technology. Even if you have it repaired, I do not think you’ll get your money back if you try to sell it on.
Maybe time to bite the bullet and get a new server.
That is the conclusion I am coming to. Just wondered if I could prove it was damaged during the inspection I could get some compensation. Thanks .
You might get that proof, if you get it repaired… Maybe… 
I very much doubt it.
I will just have to be more careful in future. I didn’t use it much tbh but it was good to know it was there.
It might be damaged caused by someone turning off the power without shutting the Unitiserve down properly first. But more likely is that the Unitiserve battery is dead and needs replacing. The battery becoming dead isn’t an issue as long as the Unitiserve is powered up, but next time you try to restart it, it won’t start up.
You can’t just pop in a new battery because it’s also necessary to set the Unitiserve back to the Naim defaults in the BIOS and not the default that the PC Card in the Unitiserve automatically selects.
It’s not too difficult to reset the BIOS. You need a VGA display that you can plug into the back of the Unitiserve and a PS/2 or USB keyboard. Sometimes people say you need a mouse too, but you don’t actually. PS/2 doesn’t mean PlayStation by the way. It’s the old round connector that keyboards used to use back in the day. But USB keyboards are easy to find or buy specially even.
If you can find a display and keyboard then post here and one of us can tell you what to do. If you just can connect a display and restart the Unitiserve again, you will be able to see where it is hanging.
The battery is a CR2032 that you can buy from Tesco or more or less anywhere. But to change it yourself you need to be competent and confident to go into a computer without causing any electrostatic discharge damage.
I recall that there is also a sequence of key presses way of resetting the BIOS which @NeilS has told us about, which doesn’t need the screen. But I will need to find that. If I do I will post a link, or of course he may come along and have it hand himself.
OK I did find Neil’s posting. The Naim forum search couldn’t find it, but Google did!
As I posted above, you can’t just change the battery, you have to reset the BIOS too. It’s not hard to do, but it needs effort, as I describe.
Mentioned in this thread, plus other info might be relevant.
Before you give up on your Unitiserve I would suggest the following:
First, it’s just possible that your US is still visible on your network. If so, navigate to the Music folder on a computer (use the Finder on a Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on a PC - not the DTC or N-Serve). Make a copy of the MQ folder, so that at least you have a backup of sorts.
If you leave the US alone for long enough there’s a small chance that it will sort itself out and start to work normally. Leave it alone for at least 24 hours and you might get lucky.
Next, turn it off and leave it powered down for maybe half an hour, then restart. In the past I have had to do this several times before it worked.
If you still have no luck, the battery replacement is the most likely solution. Yes, it’s a bit of a faff, but what else are you going to do? If it runs you have options to keep it or sell it for a few hundred. As a non runner @garyi might give you a fiver for it and turn it into a toaster or something.
That isn’t the link I meant. @NeilS has a couple of times given the key sequence to reset the BIOS without needing a working screen.
Thanks for reminding me. I did try resetting bios too. Didn’t work for me.
Thanks. Probably wasn’t a bad battery that caused your issue then. You could probably learn more from what your VGA display showed was going on during startup, but whether it’s worth doing that in the circumstances is another thing.
Yes, repair of the US might be a tad expensive but how much is your time worth? If you cant access the unit over the network and copy the MQ folder to a backup location, then its either repair it or re-rip. Depending on how many CDs you have ripped, you make your decision based on that.
Yes! I found it about an hour ago and edited it into my earlier post. I must print it out and stick it into my folder of things I want to know but can’t remember!
There might be another option, of a dedicated data recovery person extracting the data from the hard drive. They don’t work cheap however. But it’d be worth asking for an estimate.
my unitiserve also wouldn’t boot and the naim logo was flashing non stop.
It happened on two occasions: flat backup battery and faulty power supply.
The faulty power supply still supplied the power supply but apparently unitiserve did not start because the voltage was not optimal. The assistance center in Italy solved the problem immediately and in a few minutes with a new Unitiserve power supply it started working correctly again.
The cause of the failure was due to a sudden interruption of electrical service
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