Background: So I have a 2G Drobo attached to my G4 MDD Mac server (10.5.8) with the latest firmware/dashboard. I recently decided to upgrade the storage from (1.5t/1.5t/750g/750g) to (2t/2t/1.5t/1.5t). The first drive upgrade went without a hitch - I just popped it out, and 2 days later everything was back to solid green. After the first drive had been swapped, everything seemed good. Solid green lights, Drobo Dashboard showed expanded capacity.
Problem: When I tried to upgrade the second drive, I saw that it too would take roughly 50 hours to rebuild. After a few hours, I noticed AFP was being slow. I restarted AFP a few times, and when that didn’t help, I reconnected to the server later to check the progress and saw that the dashboard was telling me that no Drobo was connected.
Things I’ve tried:
I first waited a few days, to see if the drobo would finish the rebuild so that I could power it down nicely. It’s been 9 days now, and the drobo still is blinking orange/green (rebuild). I rarely hear disk activity, although both green lights at the bottom above the blue capacity meter are solid on.
I started reading, and figured out that disconnecting from the computer was not fatal in and of itself. I rebooted the server and tried to reconnect, but Drobodashboard still shows “No Drobo Connected.”
Both my Drobo and my Mac are on UPS power supplies, so I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t a power hiccup that caused this.
Situation now:
It seems like there’s no alternative to yanking the power, since I cannot get the drobo to connect to my server.
Given that, am I better off:
a) leaving the drives as they are in the drobo and powercycling it
b) replacing the last drive I added with the that I took out and powercycling, in hopes that the Drobo will not have altered data on the other three drives, and that replacing that one will make everything whole.
c) something else, although that seems like the only two options since waiting hasn’t worked.