So I spent all weekend running seagate and spinrite diagnostics on the drives in my Drobo, because it’s been doing odd things (again) lately and I’m wondering if it’s bi-polar “I have your files / no I don’t / yes I do / no I certainly don’t” nature is caused not by a failure in the Drobo firmware or a constantly corrupting partition table, but instead something more simple like a bad disk that the Drobo just hasn’t detected.
So after running the 4-5 hour test on each disk (and then some) and finding nothing wrong, I finally figured maybe it’s just me and I’ll reformat it and re-partition it. So I put all the disks back in the box and boot it back up (irony alert: now everything is there just dandy). Then I put my desktop computer back together (it was needed to attach the disks to it to run the utilities) and boot it backup. It boots to the Windows logo, and reboots. Reboots to the Windows logo and reboots. Reboots to the.. well, you get the picture.
Luckily the second time it reboots it gives me the option to go into the repair console, which is where it is now, with a little progress bar going slowly and sadly back and forth across the screen “searching for problems”.
I actually ran it once already and I got tired and thought maybe I’ll just try rebooting it and nope, that didn’t work. So I’m back here, hoping that I don’t have to run a disk utility on my desktop machine, which, before being opened to run disk checks on other disks, was running absolutely fine.
Some days I really want to just toss all this stuff in the trash and start over.
Hopefully soon it’ll come back and tell me that it’s found something wrong, fixed it, and I can now reboot back to my computer again.