I had a Drobo Mini for some time now and the two 1TB disks that were in bay1 and bay3 were not enough, I installed a new 1,5TB drive in bay2 and everything was “drobotically” fine. Problem aroused when I wanted to add another 1,5TB in the only free slot, bay0. This slot proved totally unresponsive to any drive I tried in it. I removed all the drives from the existing pack to ensure data is safe and played around with a couple of drive makes and sizes. All have the disk indicator led (the long, curved one) on the top left lighted red and my Drobo Mini telling me there is no disk installed in bay0.
Anyone had similar issues? Any hint on what I could do? Don’t have a Drobo distributor here in Hungary I guess.
Thanks for reading. Should you have an idea, thanks for helping.
Csaba
hi csaba, sorry to hear for your problem.
it may be that the backplane which connects the drives to the drobbo mini maybe got damaged. (this can usually happen if drobos get physically moved around with drives inside, or shaken a bit during transit)
if you have all your diskpack drives removed currently, then please remember that when you put them back inside, they should only be put in when power is all “off” and unplugged. (you might already be aware though just to mention)
its good that you removed your existing diskpack (hopefully with the power off first), to test out other drives.
if some spare test drives, show up as green and are recognised elsewhere, but not recognised in the first bay (your bay0), then it is probably a physical problem with that bay.
aside from possibly getting a replacement under warranty, or if you have drobocare, then i think the main way forward would be to obtain a replacement model if you need it, and then you could follow the migration process as mentioned here: http://www.drobo.com/resource-center/migration/
i suggest this because unless you know exactly how to open it up and how to fix it electronically, you could spend a lot of time trying to figure that out… if i opened up my drobo to try and fix it, i probably would be looking at it for a long time, and getting through several sandwiches of pick salami and pirrozarrany trying to figure it out…
