Okay… So we are in the last 48 hours of a huge project. We have a 4 man team of FX dudes pounding away at the 30 some odd shots to be completed for a 3 minute short film.
Queue the Drobo FS to FAIL!
We’ve recently purchased a Drobo FS RAID storage Solution to help us manage our IMPORTANT data and to allow us all to access the data via GB/ Ethernet. The system was good. It was working. Apparently though one needs a second DROBO to back up the fail safe Drobo we are already using. That’s the point right? To never have to worry about this kind of issue when using the famous DROBO? Well we must all learn that you will always need back ups of your backups! SO what happened?….
Drobo was low on storage space.
Ross put a new 2TB drive into one of the Drobo’s available slots.
Drobo accepts drive and wants to reboot.
We reboot Drobo…. …. …. Drobo never comes back :(.
So we call TECH support at Datarobotics because we are getting an error message “Can’t mount drobo due to internal problem” The drives are fine, the lights are green, but it wont mount. Now if you call regular tech support you will talk to a nice person who will go through the usual steps in trying to get your Drobo to remount. Turn it off, turn it on, unplug this, unplug that, yadda yadda… NOTHING works. So… apparently we have to move to STAGE 2 Tech Support. (Seriously,t they have stages, which is really annoying) So we get put on a list to be called back when a stage 2 tech is available. That was over a day ago. In the mean time we search and search the Internet and Datarobotics site hoping to find any sort of information on why or how to go about fixing this issue. NOTHING! Can’t find anything. Apparently it’s super secret knowledge that we need. So we WAIT…. … … and wait…. FINALLY they call us this morning. Ross has a little chat and the “Stage 2″ tech tell hims to do this…
Press : CONTROL > SHIFT > M – (while having Drobo Dashboard Open).
This apparently puts the drobo into it’s “Maintenance Mode” and goes about an automated system first aid. This super secret shortcut is nowhere on their website or in any blog we’ve searched. This simple bit of info could have saved us an entire day! Why couldn’t a regular tech have told us this? Annoying. Because this option is only available to you in the dashboard when you are having this EXACT PROBLEM! So… it’s not like it’s something that could ruin your system. Okay okay .. so right now it’s doing it’s maintenance thingy and we are waiting again. While this is not guaranteed to work, it is the next step in the process. So if you are having this issue.. .bypass the long drawn out annoying tech support waiting list and just type those fun keys in while Dashboard is open. This may save your life! Most likely it will! :)
Good Luck Drobo Peeps!
I ran into a similar issue. Durring a synchronization, I experienced a power outage. My Drobo(1st Gen) connected by USB recovered just fine, but the Drobo-FS gave me the exact same error message. Luckily this wasn’t a production system, because I too had to wait for support so that some guy could tell me Ctrl+Shift+M. Nice. I could have been back online with my system 4 days ago! I’m leaving them a nice reply back on the issue. Nice to know I didn’t miss anything. I initially searched all resources and found no fancy secret repair mode instructions either.
I had the same problem. After 5 days of waiting and 2 phone calls to support they finally told me about the secret command. Haven’t tried it yet, hopefully it works….
same same for me, their support seems to be very weak and the reason i chose DroboFS is because the promo videos gave me the impression they care about my data more than I do!! doesnt actually feel like that when things like this happen.
My first ticket generated a standard response of try a different cable and then they changed the status to resolved!!! then ignored me whilst i replied 3 times saying i need more help. In the end i phoned them up and the guy on the phone said “I dont know why my colleague didnt tell you this in the beginning but try Ctrl-Shift-M”
I’ve just started running mine – fingers crossed it works.
hmmm did not work for me. took around 18 hours to rebuild then told to contact drobo support.
When I contacted them i was told to reboot, i did, message told me that it could not mount. starting to have a really sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve now had to send in another diagnostics file.
Hoping there’s a Plan B.
The really annoying thing is because this isn’t standard RAID i can’t use 3rd party tools to recover the data.
Well on to the next steps… I figure it’s useful to have a record of this in case anyone else finds themselves in the same situation.
I’ve now been told that they released some new firmware a couple of hours ago and to try that.
Downloaded and Installed… and now for a Ctrl-Shift-M again.
…Relief, as I can see my data again – question is do I want to subject my Business to this experience again. (potentially). With standard RAID configs I know I have a range of options regarding data recovery but with the DroboFS’s BeyondRAID technology i’m not sure there are products out there that know what to do with it.
I guess I’ll have to backup the backup, cross fingers and hope for the best…
As I bought my Drobo two years ago I thought I found the ultimate solution for storage and backups. Unfortunately all the time I had nothing but problems with it. And DataRobotics offers the worst service in the industry at least to my knowledge. I lost some data on it, managed to recover it with some third party applications but then two discs out of four stopped working within two months and were not repairable, I change them and the data was restored. And two month later it stopped working at all saying that there are no discs in the drobo… It appeared that all the 4 discs were gone and there is no way to recover any data from any of them! Now I tried to log in into my account at the Drobo site, but it didn’t recognize my login information. When I tried to get my login information sent to me by e-mail it appeared that my registration information is non-existant and my account is deleted. There is no way for me to contact their support. I found the local Asian office e-mail address but haven’t get any replies to any of my 3 e-mails. I wander how the company selling such a rubbish can be still in business and keeping sending me their promotional information about new products! Shame!
Same problem as Peteris Lehtla but I managed to pay a data recovery tech $4000 to get all my files back worst system and worst customer service I have ever experienced if you get a Drobo get two you will need it.
Has anybody got the “Control-Shift-M” to work on Dashboard version 2.0.2 for Mac?