My Drobo Pro is refusing to turn on. I flick the on/off switch, all the drives spin up, the power led in the front blinks, as it always does while booting, and the HD LED is on permanently. I can hear the drives working, I think (Fans are so loud it’s hard to tell).
My Drobo is filled with 2x2TB drives and 6x1TB drives. I have 2-disk-failure enabled, and am using 5.37TB of the available 5.44. Yesterday in DroboDashboard it showed me that 0 bytes were free, which I found interesting. Anyway, now it won’t start.
I have read that it can take up to 5 minutes to start if it was doing some work when it was switched off, but this is not the case with this drobo. Any help would be much appreciated!
you are using a LOT of the space in it - drobo’s dont like being very full - my drobopro got stuck in a reboot loop when it was very very full and in the end i had to have my drobopro replaced then copy everything off the new drobo and reset my array
if that is what has happened to you- support might ask you to put it into “read-only” mode so you can recover your data (that is something you should only do when support tell you to)
also - even when in the read only mode - my faulty/very very full drobopro took about NINETY (90) minutes to boot (from pressing the power button to it actually lighting up all the lights and connecting to the computer!)
if this is what has happened then its really an issue with your diskpack and you need to contact support
the drobopro itself my have died. if this is the case then all of yoru data should be lovely and safe and you just need to pop your diskpack into a new drobopro - again - in this case you will need to contact support.
Firstly : i would turn it on then just leave it for 2-3 hours - see if it does eventually boot!
if it doesn’t then :
the ONLY test you really can/should do without contacting support first is:
Power down your drobo
remove ALL yours disks (while troubleshooting it is best to keep them in the correct order)
with ALL your disks removed - turn drobopro back on - it should boot and be detected by drobodashboard and ask you to insert disks.
if it works with no disks - then you have an issue with your diskpack - and you need to contact support
if it wont boot with no disks in it then it looks like the drobopro has died/is dying - and you need to contact support
the important thing is to take your time and be very very sure of the consequences of your actions before trying any “troubleshooting” since its very very easy to make a bad situation a LOT worse
Since I do not necessarily need to access the data right away I’ll leave it running for a few hours and see if it will eventually complete it’s starting sequence. It’s just a bit funny though - the reason I turned it on was to free up space - I decided to re-reip my blu-rays to iso files rather than mkv’s. Oh well
I hope that the drobo unit itself is fine as well as the disk pack. I would hate to either have to go through the process of replacing it (I live in Europe, the DRI people are far far away) or worse yet, losing the data on the drobo, as it’s not backed up anywhere else. I know I should back up, but where to? It’s simply too much data![hr]
oh, and I am running the 1.11 firmware, which is the last one before the 1.2 which they pulled recently
I waited a few hours, nothing changed, drives still doing something. I pressed the on/off switch on the back briefly. Nothing happened. I stepped back. It turned off. When I turned it back on, it worked right away.
As much as I love my Drobos (I also have a 4Bay drobo), it scares me a little bit that they sometimes do things that I don’t understand. As the Dashboard doesn’t really give you detailed diagnostics, error reports or just simply event logs, it’s hard to discover just what goes wrong. Anyway, the problem I had seems to have simply “gone away”!
Completely filling a Drobo is A VERY BAD IDEA. Especially if you are not backed up. We’ve had a number of posts about the result of filling a Drobo; I don’t think any of them ended well. There is a good reason the last 5% or so was (or should have been!) very slow to fill up. Drobo was sending you a subtle or not so subtle message.
@NeilR
The “filling up” wasn’t entirely intentional - had it in single disk failure mode, switched to dual thinking 5.4 TB would be enough. Well. So much for that.
@Docchris
Good to hear that they do ship replacements that quickly. And yes, ISO’s are bigger than MKV’s and they do include extras - I want that though - a proper archive.
