I got an email from a Drobo tech yesterday afternoon telling me to install the 1.3.1 release of the Drobo firmware. I told him I’d already figured that out but that I couldn’t do it until the Drobo console recognized Drobo1. He called and said to try power cycling it without the USB cable attached, and if that didn’t work, pull all the drives and power cycle.
I left the power off for a good minute and a half, and Drobo1 booted. I plugged in the USB cable, and the Drobo console saw the hardware. The lights on the front panel of the Drobo said that the disk was appropriately full, but Windows reported that the disk was corrupted and unreadable: I had lost all my data. Thank goodness it was just a backup.
I upgraded the firmware on Drobo1, and for good measure, did the same for Drobo2, which had been operating well. I formatted Drobo1 using the Drobo console. I recreated the directory structure, set Vice Versa to work backing up all the files that had been lost, and went to bed.
When I got up this morning, the backup had failed. There was about 250 GB of data on Drobo1. The Drobo console reported everything was healthy. The file structure appeared correct for the data that was there. I tried writing a file to the Drobo and couldn’t. I tried opening a file stored on the Drobo and got a “file not found” message with the suggestion that I make sure a disk was in the specified drive. I went down to the server room and took a look at the Drobo. All the lights were normal. This is the same situation that the box was in when my most recent troubles began. It seemed that the firmware update had not fixed the problem.
I thought about rebooting the Drobo, but it occurred to me that I might lose useful data from the log if I did that. I right-clicked on the Drobo Dashboard icon in the system try and selected “Get diagnostic information”. I got a popup that said that I should wait while the console gathered diagnostic information. I waited…
…and waited. Finally, I got a popup that said, “I am unable to save the diagnostic information.” And, like so many of these windows that report bad news, the only option was to click “OK.” Why can’t there be a “That sucks” button?
And that’s where it sits. I will notify Drobo tech support.
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