Corrupted Drobo - anyway to recover?

Out of the blue, my drobo is inaccessible. Looks like the MFT is corrupted. chkdsk /F can't access the drive and under disk management, it shows as RAW data.

This is a Drobo gen 2 and when setup I created a 16TB volume but only have 3 drives in there - about 1tb of data. I tried a few data recover software but none seems to work.

Getdataback - after ran for 2 days, reported that there's no NFTS file system
Recuva - can't access the drive
testdisk - didn't work
r-studio - this one is SLOW. Ran for almost 2 days and had to stop...
Stella Phoenix - currently running....

Does anyone have any idea of how to recover this? I heard partition magic can recover lost partition but it's not sure if it works in this case.

OMGoodness...and I just set mine up.
It seems to be working quite well.
Did you contact Data Robotics? ...or their Support section?
...or Drobo Forums?

I hope you can recover all of your Data! Good Luck!!

Yeah, I was on the phone with support for more than 1hr. We tried all the "normal" support steps to make sure the drobo is healthy. The dashboard shows that it is - all green light , 2TB of avail space and 950GB is in used etc...

Just from the top of my head,....you could give a try to a certain software (can't remember the exact name) from the "Hiren's Boot CD" (again,not sure,wich version of it,but the last two or three should have it)...specifically,it'​s a "chkdsk recovery" wich really works...I remember using it successfully for a few times in situations similar with yours.
Just dwld the Hiren's stuff,burn the ISO (or whatever it is)on a blank CD/DVD and boot your system (with the corrupted HDDs already attached) with it (use your BIOS boot menu),then follow the Hiren's menu....that should do it.
HTH!
Regards,

PS
Plan B...if the above isn't what you need,you could try some recovery stuff from the same CD.In some difficult situations,the DOS proggies happens to help...

Are all 3 disks coming up? I'm wondering if you had a 2-disk failure or a crash in the superblock sectors. If the latter, you may have lost access to your filesystem but your data may still be recoverable. Your best bet is probably sending the unit into Drobo for recovery.

I do hope you have a backup too.

A Drobo or any RAID are just a piece of hardware to give a better availability than single-disk solutions. But a RAID is not a backup solution, except when the RAID is a complement to other storage systems.

So storing the data on a RAID does not make the slightest changes in the backup requirements. It is just a larger and a bit more resilient single disk.

In this case, you will have to be very careful about what corrective actions you take, to avoid introducing further problems.

Does the Drobo support the saving of the RAID configuration to a file or USB thumb that can be stored somewhere else? This kind of information is normally stored on the individual disks and in nonvolatile memory in the RAID controller, but if it gets corrupted the RAID gets into big problems figuring out what disks it has connected and how they should be used to form the RAID partitioning.

It's a bit interesting (and/or scary) that the Drobo support didn't had any debug steps that could either solve the problem or pinpoint where everything went wrong. I would have expected that just about any combination of configuration or access error on disks or internal EEPROM would have been possible to detect using some power-on self test. The only way I would see a self-test get into real troubles would be if the Drobo software crashed in a way that it performed garbage writes to all your disks for critical parts of the file system or of their configuration blocks.

That type of accident is quite similar to the other common problem where it is instantly obvious that a RAID in itself isn't a backup - the other two problems are programs that deletes files or incorrectly modifies files. The RAID have redundancy from a HDD failure, but no redundancy from an incorrect write command feeding wrong data to all the disks in the RAID.

Did Drobo support come with any suggestion what your next step should be?

Do you have a backup?

How are you connecting from computer to storage device? Are you positive that is not the issue?

Yes all 3 drives show green from the dashboard and look healthy.
I'm using Win 7 64-bit and connecting via firewire. But now I'm connecting via USB. The volume shows up but no partition. Some recover software see the drive letter and some don't recognize it at all. Because the volume is 16TB eventhough the actual data is only 1tb (2tb avail space), most software takes a long time to run. I may give r-studio another try but it may take 9-10 days to scan.

Drobo suggested try some of the recover software but nothing about sending the unit back to them. I'll contact them and see if it's possible.

I have some of them back up but not all ....suckie

All 3 of your drives may come up, but there's still a possibility that some parts of the drives were corrupted. I don't know if Drobo provides this, but see if you can get the SMART info on each of the drives -- this will tell you if each of the drives are actually clean or if they've encountered uncorrectable errors. That'll give you a clue as far as if the errors were drive-level or higher up.

If the drives are indeed clean, you can take a look at other areas. The RAID firmware on the Drobo could potentially be buggy and may not have handled a corner case correctly. Or the memory module in the Drobo is flakey and turned a few of your 0's into 1's and vice versa. You may want to see if the Drobo has a comprehensive memory test that can catch this. Or if there are some logs kept on the Drobo that you can peruse for clues. Sending your system to Drobo for analysis would be worthwhile if they provide that service. There's also a possibility of giving Drobo remote access to your RAID if their hardware supports that, but I doubt it...

Then you get to the filesystem level. I assume you're using NTFS. There's a possibility that your disks are all fine, your Drobo RAID acted appropriately, but your filesystem crapped out. Usually I've seen cases where the memory on the PC has started to get flakey, and that in itself could've started messing with your data. Keep in mind that since the Drobo is a direct-attached device, it will be using the memory on your PC to read and write data to it directly.

Unfortunately, data recovery is a pain in the butt -- it can be tremendously time-consuming, costly, and in the end, you may not be able to recover the data. But first step with data recovery is to do image backup of all your disks -- you have to remember that some data recovery process can be destructive and can actually eliminate any possibility of recovery. Unfortunately, unless you have some spare drives with large enough capacity you can image to as well as a PC setup to do this, there's certainly some cost and time involved with it.

Alternatively, if your data is worth it, get a quote from one of the local data recovery shops. They may be able to pull enough of your lost files from your box to make it worthwhile.

sportmode wrote in post #12703171
I don't know if Drobo provides this, but see if you can get the SMART info on each of the drives -- this will tell you if each of the drives are actually clean or if they've encountered uncorrectable errors. That'll give you a clue as far as if the errors were drive-level or higher up.

If Drobo do not support SMART info and their support are not able to figure out if the disks are physically ok or not, then Drobo should be dropped from the market. No, I really can't see them not having built-in support for SMART supervision.

This is one of the major reasons for not seeing a RAID as a backup replacement. When the RAID controller gets the "wrong" write command, it will perform that command. Being a RAID, the write will affect all disks in the volume. The end result will be similar to a bad write command to a single disk, or a simple disk mirror.

Taking a raw copy of the partitions and performing the recovery on this copy is most definitely the #1 step when a disk/file system is in dire need of repair. This is a reason why huge partitions are not always a good idea, even if it is easier to work with a continuous partition than to have to figure out which partition that contains a specific directory or how much more that fits in the remaining space of a partition.

1) A huge partition that fails may bring lots of files with it into the grave.

2) Having a need to take a copy of a huge multi-disk partition can be really nasty if the involved computer don't have interfaces for enough disks to span the partition. And it takes a RAID controller or a volume manager to be able to concatenate multiple backup disks into a big enough surface to swallow the original partition.

Update:

After trying alot of recovery software out there, none of them seems to work on this volume.
I finally downloaded and tried ZAR - Zero Assumption Recovery, and it was able to scan and see the files structure. The nice thing is it can scan just the data portion and not the entire 16TB volume and still for 2TB it took along time. It's in the process of copying the files from the drobo to another external, about 50% now and probably another 12 hours to go.

Now, I need to find out which of the 3 drives in the drobo is going bad.

4x4rock wrote in post #12707660
Now, I need to find out which of the 3 drives in the drobo is going bad.

There may not be any hardware error.

A software goof by your computer or by the controller in the Drobo could have been the cause of your troubles.

Edit: Or a glitch in the electronics, resulting in some temporary data corruption making the computer or the Drobo misbehave.

I'd be on the phone escalating the case at drobo. You paid a hefty premium to buy their device, which has failed at its primary function, let them sort it out.

Working in IT, I have really lost my patience for crappy support for so-called first tier products.

mwolfe wrote in post #12709537
I'd be on the phone escalating the case at drobo. You paid a hefty premium to buy their device, which has failed at its primary function, let them sort it out.

Working in IT, I have really lost my patience for crappy support for so-called first tier products.

But you are aware that the Drobo may have performed excellently?

When a file server drops a file system, there may be a problem with the file server. What you know, is that it isn't the client, since the client machine doesn't have access to the raw file system. It can only access individual files in the file system.

When a raid serves out raw disk space and the file system breaks, then it's hard to know if it is the raid controller or the machine who accessed the file system that did wrong. The NTFS journaling is not 100% fool proof. And if it was, it is not better than the OS that generates the writes to the file system.

I had a problem awhile ago where my Drobo-S all of a sudden "thought" I had 2 bad drives. I had 4 at the time and didn't appear to lose anything. I took it offline, powered it down, removed all the drives and reinserted 2 of them + a spare drive I had. Surprisingly it came back up but took overnight to recover itself. I ran some checks on the "bad" drives but they checked out ok. I put one of them back and it's been 6 months. That is my recollection but it has been fine since then, about 6 months ago with the same drives.

I was in contact with Drobo and the first thing they asked me was to run a diagnostic and to send them the logfile (Drobo keeps a log file of all events). It looked, to them, like 2 drives had actually gone bad. Anyway, after a lot of back and forth and escalation, and a hiccup about a week later, it's been fine.

Not sure what model you have or what they asked you to provide in terms of diagnostics, but I hope it's all resolved.