I have a 5n with 5 drives. From top to bottom 1tb, 1tb, 300gb, 2tb, 2tb.
Today I removed the 300gb to upgrade to a 1tb. I received the message that it was rebuilding (dont remember the the actual wording) and it would take about 20 minutes.
After 1 hour I came back and the drobo was no longer visible on the dashboard and the share not accessible. All the lights on the drobo were green.
I figured it had completed and powered off but somehow got stuck…
Well I was wrong. I powered on and it goes into a constant reboot.
I booted without the drives and it says to insert the drives, that too many were removed.
I start inserting one by one and I get to the part where it’s rebuilding again and it shows about 20 mins remaining. The progress bar moves but after some short time you hear the hd’s click and the unit reboots itself. It starts rebooting on its own again.
I have tried the above process using both the original 300gb and the new 1tb without any luck.
I opened a ticket with support and provided them the log file. Hopefully they can help.
Anyone know how I can get around this reboot loop that it’s in?
You started off on the right track - seeing if the Drobo would start up with all the drives removed. What you should not have done though, assuming your data was valuable to you, is start inserting the drives one by one with the unit powered. By doing that you have certainly destroyed your data. The correct procedure, after making sure that the unit powers up empty and is found by the Dashboard, is to power down and then re-insert the drives, making sure they are secure, before powering up again. There is a page of instructions for this particular problem and, if the power supply is ok, the indications are that you have a disk problem, rather than a chassis problem.
Well I was following directions from the dashboard, which was asking to insert drives. The dashboard detects each drive with the “drobo detected a new drive” message. Then after all drives are inserted I get t"Drive redundancy in critical state with no extra drives due to a failed or removed drive, do not remove any drive." I also get the blue progress bar “Data Protection: In progress” and drives flash orange/green in the dashboard>status.
I thought the technology built into these units was the fact that you could easily swap, replace drives, etc…
After it failed, I did boot up again without the drives, then shutting down, inserting drives and powering up…yet no luck.
I think the entire thing is shot, how can I boot up with my drives and format everything and start again?
I think you’re confusing normal operation with troubleshooting. In normal operating mode you can indeed replace drives, provided you obey a simple rule: don’t remove any drive that has a flashing green/yellow light. When you powered up the chassis with no drives installed you were not in normal operating mode - you were troubleshooting. It is not normal to have zero drives in the Drobo. In order to work the Drobo needs you to insert drives, which it proceeds to format. That’s how you set it up when you bought it new and you used either new drives or drives whose contents you no longer valued. However, this time you were troubleshooting and ought to have kept your disk pack safely out of the way. Can you see the difference?
Did it power up successfully with no drives installed? I infer that it did, so the trouble lies with your disk pack, not the Drobo chassis. You seem to have one or more bad drives.
In order to start over, losing anything that might remain of your data, I suggest powering the chassis up empty and when the Dashboard prompts you to insert drives, put just one of them in. Leave it to do its thing. If the light next to the drive eventually turns green the drive is good, so put a drive in the next slot and leave it again until either that drive also indicates green or the unit starts re-booting. If it enters the reboot loop you have discovered a bad drive - the most recent one you installed. Each green light indicates a good drive. This will take some time but with patience you will likely get it working with four or even five of your six disks, but it will be empty of data.