My Drobo S (first gen) frequently caused delays in Windows7 boot up, and lately often been in constant reboot mode. All my drives were fine, but Drobo wouldn’t be seen by Windows oe Dashboard on and off[/font]. So I bought new Drobo 5D to migrate my drives to new Drobo. As migrating procedure on Drobo website suggests, I did firmware update. Since my old Drobo S was giving me “unable to connect to Drobo service” message for autoupdate, I downloaded latest version I saw available for my Drobo (2.1.5) and updated firmware in Drobo dashboard. Old firmware was 2.1.2 version.
After I rebooted Drobo S, as Dashboard message instructed, now all my drives show as solid red, and message says “too many drives were removed, please re insert removed drives”. It still correctly sees all 5 drives capacity in status mode (but in red), but in capacity mode says “Too many hard drives have been removed. Please re-insert the removed hard drives.” But all 5 drives are in!
I shut down Drobo from Dashboard, and after it powered off removed and re-inserted all 5 drives in the same exact slots where they been before. After I turned Drobo S again, all 5 drives show red, and same warning message appears.
I don’t want to move my drives to new Drobo 5D until I know I won’t loose my data. And at this point I can’t access it on old Drobo S as well. Is there’s way to revert firmware update? Or anything else I could do to salvage my data? I used it as my primary data storage. All my work for last 3+ years is there!
I have all 5 bays occupied with 4Tb drives, and have it set in double disks failure protection mode. I had 26% of free space before all this happened, and had 2 partitions (now none!).
Tech support was useless so far. Maybe someone here could help.
hi, if you power down your drobo and computer and then unplug the computer connection cable which goes to the drobo, if you power up just the drobo does it get any further?
if the drobo boots up (with booting sequence going through the blue capacity led lights), does it then end up with all red, or does it looks like it switches off in standby mode (which usually happens without an active computer cable attached) or does it make vibrations and noise as though the drives are being worked on?
the root cause of your issue is probably different than what i had a while back (and yours sounds more related to the firmware update but not 100% sure), but i have had a similar all lights red after a powercut with my 1st and 2nd gen 4-slot drobos, and i had to go through a couple of these unplug and reboots and a fair bit of waiting before they appeared normal again.
try those in the meantime, but keep being patient with support as they should be able to help you especially if you bought a new drobo to migrate to… 
(understandably you might be speaking to them in a worried way, especially bearing in mind the circumstances, though just be wary of that fact, in case you mention (or leave something out) which might be vital to them properly understanding your situation, and possible solution).
First, thanks for response Paul.
After tech support sent me link to manually re-install old firmware drives don’t show up red anymore, but now I have new issues: my old Drobo constantly reboot and won’t show up in Dashboard. I did that going to read only mode without drives thing that was mentioned in other thread here, and what tech support recommended me. But it won’t change anything.
I did sector by sector duplication of all 5 disks I had in my old Drobo.
(Btw, knowing how not reliable those duplicators are, I bought 3 of different manufacturers, and sure only 1 of them work as it supposed to http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Duplicator-2-5-Inch-ORICO-6828US3-C-SV/dp/B00LFKUZYK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432600155&sr=8-1&keywords=orico+hard+drive+duplicator which successfully duplicated all 5 of 4TB drives from my Drobo array, plus 2 test drives. It copied 4Tb drive in just 8-9 hours)
So, to make sure I won’t do any more damage to my original drives, I try to use in new Drobo 5D newly copied drives… Zero success so far. :-/ Dashboard 2.2 wouldn’t see Drobo 5D, neither with disks or without disks installed. Windows saying hardware wasn’t recognized and driver wasn’t installed correctly.
Website saying 5D requires 2.6.7 version of Dashboard, but it also says it requires Drobo to have 3.2 firmware. I have 2 working Drobo S2, and 1 acting up S1. Question is would they work on Dashboard 2.6.7?
thanks for the new info (and about the duplicator which might be useful in future too)
im not the best person regarding firmwares and dashboards, (my gen1 and gen2 are still on 1.3.7 and 1.7.3)
but if you ask support they should be able to let you know if they will work on dashboard 2.6.7 and probably also best to ask them what the 5d needs (just in case the website needed updating and was not updated yet)