I have a Drobo 5D, as per tech support I need to clone one of the drives in my array to correct the continual reboot issue I’m having when the drives are plugged into the device.
Here is the problem I’m having. I’m not sure how to clone the drive.
I have Carbon Copy Cloner 4.0, iMac running OS X Yosemite, I plug the drive from my array into an external reader (iDsonix docking station) into the computer and the Mac comes back with the message ‘The disk you have inserted is not recognized Initialize Ignore Eject’ I don’t want to initialize it and lose the data on my array drive since I need to copy it off. If I plug the single drive into it’s bay into the Drobo unit it simply alerts me from the Drobo Dashboard that too many drives have been removed, please insert drives. I’m still not able to ‘see’ the drive in Carbon Copy Cloner as a volume that I can copy to.
How are you all cloning your drives from the Drobo?
Get a identical GOOD Drive. This Good Drive has to be the same capacity as the Fault Drive. Is also recommend to be the same model or make and vendor. If NOT, then make sure at least it is the same capacity.
Put the Good Drive into another USB external enclosure.
Install DataRescue onto the iMac or Macbook etc.
Plug in the GOOD Drive external enclosure and the Fault Drive external Enclosure to the USB ports of the Mac. Now that these 2 Good and Fault Drives are connected to the Mac using USB 3.0.
launch DataRescue app on the Mac… choose the CLONE menu… and follow the instruction to clone the FAULT drive to the Good drive.
**Important, when you plug in the Fault Drive and Good Drive via USB to the Mac. OSX will prompt you to Initialize the Drive. Just click CANCEL. As you do not want OSX to format it … or init it. Especially the Fault Drive from Drobo Disk Pack.
** In DataRescue :
Make sure the Clone is set to Disk to Disk (Block Level) Clone and NOT a Partition to Partition Clone.
Make sure you are doing a CLONE from the Fault Drive to the Good Drive and not the reverse!! check the Source is the Fault Drive and the Destination is the Good Drive.
The whole Cloning Process will take hours if NOT day(s). Depending on the capacity of the Drive and if the drives are connecting via USB 2.0 then it even takes longer.
After the Clone is completed… Exit DataRescue and eject BOTH the Fault and Good Drive.
Unplugged the Fault and Good Drive from the Mac…
Keep the FAULT Drive HDD aside for safe keeping…
Now the Good Drive is the new Cloned Drive… which is going back into the Drobo 5D and join the Disk Pack.
a) Power OFF the Drobo. POWER OFF!
b) Once the Drobo 5D is powered OFF, insert the Good Cloned Drive into the bay of the previous Fault Drive. The rest of the HDDs remains in the Drobo 5D.
c) with the Good Cloned Drive and the rest of the HDD (Drives) in the Drobo 5D.
d) Power ON the Drobo 5D.
Drobo 5D will now act on the Cloned Drive and mostly likely a rebuild will be triggered. Flashing Green and Yellow on all the drive bays.
I have Data Rescue 4 now, I can clone, however, my options in ‘Clone Strategy’ under the Preferences in Data Rescue 4 are:
Straight Copy
Reverse Copy
Bisect Copy
Segment Copy
I’m not sure if they’ve changed the language from previous versions or if I’m looking in the wrong place to choose a disk/block clone? The descriptions to my NOOB status didn’t really scream an answer.
I have external docking for the hard drives, both USB 3.0. The hard drives are exactly the same in make, model, size, manufacture and when I first tried to clone these drives with DR4 it indicated 2 days 20 hours to clone my 4TB drive. I’m thinking I’m doing something wrong if it listed this as the time frame since it was days not hours. (When I first tried this it was defaulted at Segment Copy, so perhaps this is the issue?)
After reading the new DataRescue 4 user guide… The Cloning default Preference is “Segment Copy” which is good so choose this default.
Seems like the Cloning feature of DR4 is by default all Block level clone and is disk to disk.
yes… I have clone a very bad drive 3TB pervasively… and it took 4 days! And is perfectly normal… seems the faulty drive has tons of bad sector… the cloning process will take longer…
If you want to know why … here’s an illustration… very layman explanation
Say the drive is segment 0 to segment 1000 (of cos’ the bigger the drive the more the segment) … here;s just a simple example.
The cloning process will start by cloning segment 0 - 64, if ok… then proceed to 65 - 128 (the next 64).
If during cloning 65 - 124 … there are errors… rather than just simply stop at the error segment… and proceed to the next 64 segments 125 - 189. In this case, it may have skip some good segment between 65 - 128.
So what DR4 does is sub-divide set 65 - 128 into even smaller … and cloning again… in this case, all potential good segment or books will be clone and only skipping the real bad blocks.
As you can see from this process… if a drive has many bad blocks around over the place… the cloning time will take much longer…
I’d use the dd command from a Mac OS X Terminal window as it comes included with the OS:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 bs=4096
having made sure that the drive to be copied is /dev/disk1 and the destination is /dev/disk2. The contents of /dev/disk2 will be completely overwritten. dd is a simple, powerful and very dangerous command. Type
Haha yes … you can clone a drive using “dd” command in Terminal OSX or even Linux. Without purchasing any commercial app.
But again… command line option is not for your every day people
especially if you do not understand where /dev devices are point to which raw disk etc… so there is a potential danger to clone the wrong or accidentally wipe out the fault drive…
**PLease note… /dev/disk1 or dev/disk2 is NOT FIXED! it NOT alway /dev/disk1 is the “Fault Drive” and /dev/disk2 is the “Good Empty Drive”
They can be any /dev/diskX numbering… so you have to be extra careful to determine the diskX
I strongly against using IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) RAID which is built-in to some Intel board.
By using these RAID option to “Mirror” a Drobo Fault Drive to a Good Drive is NOT recommended… as the “Mirroring” process may introducing RAID 1 mirror metadata into the disk. And it may also render Drobo Disk pack metadata useless??
The best way to Clone a Fault Disk from Drobo Disk Pack is to do a low level Disk-toDisk Block Level Clone.
This will result a “identical” cloned disk down the very blocks and sectors and also cloned all the Drobo’s metadata in that disk.
