2nd disk failure during Drobo Pro rebuild...

[Alex Upton]

I suffered a disk failure and initiated a rebuild last Thursday. Yesterday when checking the status I noticed that the time kept fluctuating from 300 to 600 to 1000+ hours left to complete. I physically inspected the unit and realized that another drive had failed as I could hear one failing to spin up completely, yet the drobo manager had not informed me of another failure. Eventually the Drobo Pro powered itself off and upon bringing it back online, the failed disk is marked offline, however now the array won't initialize because it says that I need to reinsert the original disk...

I see only one option and that's to attempt a controller, motor, and then perhaps a platter transfer with an identical drive that is known to work, assuming the platters are not the culprit.

Does anyone know if there's any way to get the drobo to initialize with 7 of the 8 drives just to attempt to pull any complete data off ? 

I had dual drive redundancy enabled, but I suspect that since not all drives were of equal size the rebuild process hadn't finish sorting the data proper to take advantage of that...

At present time I have the drobo powered off.

Any suggestions at this stage would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.