What to do when an upgrade breaks the disk pack?
David A. Desrosiers
closed the door on helping me, because I run Linux. Linux is
completely unsupported (their words), and even moreso if you use a
volume size > 2TB. Here's my story...
About a year ago, I bought the Drobo v2 (usb+fw) unit, and populated
it with a 1TB/750GB/1TB/750GB disk pack. The device was partitioned
with an 8TB volume and had 1.2TB of data stored on it, ranging from
personal (photos, music, documents, system backups), professional
(documents, scanned paperwork, system images) and public data (CPAN,
Gutenberg, etc. mirrors).
This Drobo was running firmware 1.3.1 from about 4/17/09, which solved
a usb and firewire issue I was having. The Drobo has been shut down
and rebooted several hundred times in the last year, without a single
issue at all.
Recently I posted to the drobospace forums about some bad performance
issues on the underlying fs itself while backing up and deleting data,
and asked if anyone had considered tuning the fs with tune2fs. While
awaiting any replies, it was suggested that my 1.3.1 firmware was too
old, and that I should upgrade to the current 1.3.5 firmware.
I did a full, low-level fsck of the filesystem (took about 18 hours),
backed up some data to it, attempted to delete some data (which was
painfully slow), and then cleanly shut down the Drobo. I brought it
back up (under 1.3.1), and tested that it mounted correctly (it did),
and then I upgraded the firmware using a Windows Drobo Dashboard (1.6
I believe). The upgrade indicated it was successful.
I shut the Drobo down, plugged it back into my Linux host, and it
never booted back up. What I have are 7 blue LEDs from the right, and
nothing more.
After going round and round with DRI support and the drobospace
forums, it is now the official stance that the reason the Drobo does
not complete booting, is because I have a > 2TB volume allocated on
it.
DRI support basically told me to go pound sand, and that I'm screwed.
Reformat, and start over. Unfortunately, the Drobo contained 10+ years
of my backups and data (yes, I know, the Drobo is a toy, not a real
backup device with any level of redundancy). They also said that there
are no drive-recovery companies that can help me, because the drive
layout is not a format they understand, and DRI will not share that
format with any companies, even partners under NDA.
I directly lay blame on the 1.3.5 firmware, and whatever was changed
in it, that no longer can recognize my volume, or some other issue
(drive timeout? decreased spin time? who knows!).
The disk pack still contains my actual data, which I can see with dd +
strings, but since the Drobo will not complete booting, it never hands
the block-level device back to my host OS (Windows, Mac or Linux).
If what DRI claims is true, the Drobo will refuse to boot a > 2TB
volume if that volume contains an ext fs, but it WILL boot a > 2TB
volume if that volume contains HFS+ or NTFS. I don't buy this excuse
at all, because that disk pack could have random 1's and 0's all over
it, and it shouldn't care _at boot time_, what the block-level device
has on it.
At this point, DRI support has also refused to give me the last-
resort, read-only firmware that might allow me to boot the disk pack
under any conditions, so I can get my data off of it.
I'm pretty pissed off, that the upgrade from 1.3.1 to 1.3.5 has
resulted in the Drobo holding my data hostage, and I'm looking for
ideas, opinions and alternatives.
My next step is to image each of the drives in the disk pack, and try
to dd off the disk pack header information that contains the firmware
version and disk info (appears to be the first ~51 bytes of each
physical disk) from a working 1.3.1 disk pack and reapply that onto
the non-working 1.3.5 disk pack, downgrade the firmware in my Drobo
unit, and attempt to boot it all as if it was an untouched 1.3.1 Drobo
booting a 1.3.1 disk pack.
What other option do I have left? I can't just kiss my data goodbye,
because Drobo refuses to boot the physical disk pack.
DRI support also indicated that they've "never tried" to plug a disk
pack into a multi-port SATA card and treat it like a normal RAID or
LVM, and read the data off of it that way. Really? I'm shocked if
they've never even so much as attemped that.
I'm open to ideas, suggestions, companies that can help, strategies
and anything else I can try.
Thanks in advance.