HI,
My system went down after a power outage (battery backup exhausted) while I was gone. Nothing got powered on until I came back to power everything on. After I got everything powered up I thought it best to see how the Drobos were doing (I have a an S and a 5D) so I brought up Drobo Dashboard. The S bay was just fine. When I clicked on the 5D a message in Red came up and said that the firmware needed to be updated. So, not thinking to much about it, I let it update and rebooted the system. Now the 5D just sits there with the power light on, one blue light on and not registering the drives with my Mac Pro or the Drobo Dashboard. The 5D has all my backups for my OS, applications, projects and software installation files. While I’m not in a complete pickle, I’m not comfortable going for very long without doing backups on my system. Also, interesting enough, my 5D just went off extended warranty!! I’m so hoping that this is not anything serious but I can not find any clues on the Drobo site as to what the problem might be. If it was the upgrade, how do I downgrade. If not what would it be? Help would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Thayne[hr]
hi thayne, thanks for your update, and yes it is good to wait a while after any firmware or changes, to let the system catchup.
one thing just to point out though regarding disk packs (such as all the drives that are already in the drobo as a pack) is to only remove all the drives when power is all “off”, and only to put them back into where they were before, also while power is all “off”.
i tend to always say the above, (and probably always will), unless and until part of the marketing text changes to include a future possible feature that a drobo will always recognise a drive which is already one of its own, and never simply blank any drive put inside it) - i still prefer the manual 1 touch Button to confirm if newly inserted drive in Bay X can be blanked and assimilated, ideally via a set of L.E.D display lights similar to those digital pinball machine score displays 
HI Paul,
Putting in the drives while the %D was on and empty seemed to work but I’ll keep what you said in mind if this happens again. Better safe than sorry. Thank you for your help!!
Meanwhile the Saga continues. For some reason, maybe gremlins, my system has been acting real funky. The Mac Finder keeps hanging on me. I’ve rebooted to safe mode to see if I could delete the com.apple.finder.plist file and the com.apple.sidebar.plist file to reset the Finder application. However, There are no such files on my system, which seems odd. The response times are unusually long as well. I’ve run Tech Tool diagnostics and am about to run Diskwarrior. TechTool showed everything was fine, a few corrupt files but nothing that would be causing any problems. My OS drive is 1TB SSD drive and also checks out.
Also, the Drobo Dashboard only shows the 5D now and not the Drobo S drive. The S drive is not showing in Finder either but the 5D is, go figure!!
I’m about to my wits end trying to figure this all out and this has taken all day to get where I’m at!!
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Thayne
hi thayne,
while i dont have a mac, there are lots of mac users that might be able to provide some insight, though maybe in the meantime you could try some basic tests as follows?
a) main mac
what happens if you power all down
and unplug all connection cables of drobos from the mac computer
and then wait 10mins
and then reboot the mac on its own and see how things are
(maybe at this point, fixing any errors you mentioned and also with diskwarrior etc)
then to reboot the mac and recheck for errors
b) main mac + drobo_S
then, if all is ok, to try powering on drobo s (and once it boots with blue led sequence, ideally with lights through 1-10, and then going into standby mode), to then connect it to the mac.
(how do things go now?)
c) main mac + drobo 5D
if ok, to power all down again
and to repeat the b) process (but this time with the 5D)
(how do things go now?)
if all are ok again:
d) to try adding back the drobo_S
(are things still funky?)