Reuse drives from a Drobo disk pack for other purposes

Forum History General Discussion
1

Today I upgraded one of the four drives in my 2nd gen Drobo. I’d like to reuse the drive that I swapped out of the Drobo on my Mac.

I put the drive in an external enclosure and connected it via USB. Now neither Disk Utility nor diskutil recognize the drive – it simply does not appear in the list.

Can I reformat the drive? Or is a drive effectively bricked after it’s been used in a Drobo?

Couldn’t find any previous thread, if there is one, please point me towards it.

Thanks

Alexander

2

it just appears totally blank to your OS right now

you need to first partition it then format it

3

Thanks, but i might not have been specific enough: I can’t repartition the drive as Disk Utility doesn’t see it. Console prints the following messages when I plug in the drive.

26.05.10 00:44:08 kernel USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): DA0766477FFF 0x152d 0x2329 0x100
26.05.10 00:44:19 kernel USBF: 203.194 AppleUSBEHCI[0x7c73000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! (Addr: 7, EP: 1)
26.05.10 00:44:30 kernel USBF: 214.194 AppleUSBEHCI[0x7c73000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! (Addr: 7, EP: 1)
26.05.10 00:44:41 kernel USBF: 225.194 AppleUSBEHCI[0x7c73000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! (Addr: 7, EP: 1)
26.05.10 00:44:53 kernel USBF: 237.195 AppleUSBEHCI[0x7c73000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! (Addr: 7, EP: 1)
26.05.10 00:44:56 kernel USBF: 240.341 [0x8ff0900] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 1 of Hub at 0xfa400000)
26.05.10 00:44:56 kernel USBF: 240.341 [0x8ff0900] The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.

Any hints as to why the OS doesn’t connect to the USB drive? The enclosure works, I have been able to use it with a drive identical to the one that’s causing the problems.

4

No idea, something evidently isnt compatible.

but basically sorry, its not drobo - drobo’s drive just appear at totally blank - no partitions, no nothing, thats all it does to them though.

can you connect the drive directly to an SATA controller - or is it a laptop/imac or something?

5

Docchris,

thanks for your idea. Turned out the enclosure is faulty. Specifically the USB/SATA Bridge. When connected via eSata to a PC, Vista recognized the drive and I could repartition and format it.

Thanks!

Alexander

6

glad it’s sorted :smiley: