After nursing an infinite-reboot-loop Drobo Gen 2 back to health, I now can’t get the drive to actually mount. It begins the blue light sequence, gets about halfway through, then gives up and claims that “too many hard drives have been removed; please re-insert the removed drives.”
The problem is, I’m using the same three 1TB drives I’ve always had in there.
I’ve had this unit for a long while, so it’s possible the disks have simply failed (although I’m not hearing any ominous noises from them). The next thing I’m planning to try is a reset, although I would strongly prefer not to lose the data on the disk pack.
I don’t think I’ve fallen prey to the dreaded power supply failure, since the unit boots and stays on now. Do I have any options besides trying a reset? I’d consider migrating to a newer unit, but I don’t really want to spend the money unless I know for sure I’ll be able to recover my data.
hi pstarr, its good that you were able to nurse it back to health…
these posts have some info about what could have happened (though in your case, it could just be that normal use over time hapened to cause more than 1 drive to have some errors in critical places, where the gen2 only can cater for SDR for 1 drive failing) http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=146416
but there might be a chance to salvage the disk pack (at some cost of at least time depending on tools and spare drives), as mentioned here regarding a drive cloning process: http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=143618
before you try anything else though, it might be worth trying the read only mode process via the same link of http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=143618 just to see if you still get the same message (though please disable readonly mode afterwards, in preparation for the block cloning if you do try that)
Read-Only Mode isn’t getting me anywhere, alas. The Dashboard indicates the unit is in RO mode, but still throws four reds up and asks for drives to be re-inserted.
I’ll have to explore what options I might have for a block-level drive clone. Again, thanks so much for the suggestions! I really appreciate it.
i just posted some more tests on this thread http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=146416&pid=199761#pid199761 but you could try most of the “test1”) steps there, which essentially sees if your drobo is still recognised by dashboard when completely empty. (but please remember to only remove your disk pack drives when all power is OFF, and to only put them back in again while all power is OFF)