And I thought spending $350 on a Drobo was supposed to make my media more stable. I would have at least liked to see a warning or suggestion saying ‘backup any data on the HDD you put in the Drobo’. So I thought that I could just take my 2 external hard drives(that were FULL of media), slide them in the Drobo and all my data would be there. This is not how it works. . .and to learn that, I had to lose over 700GB of data.

After I put the drives in and started it up, it asked me to create a new volume for the ‘drive’. I got very paranoid, and thought I canceled everything before anything was done to the drives. I turned off the Drobo, took out the drives, and got out 1 of the external enclosures that I pulled it from. After hooking a hard drive back up, it seems the Drobo wiped the partition and the drive had to be formatted before Windows could recognize it.

I looked around on Google for hard drive recovery and found out that I needed an application that could recover a ‘lost partition’. I found a couple cheap commercial products(which I’m not a fan of), and then found a couple open source ones. 1 was a dos/text based application. . .the other was PC Inspector. I used it to scan one of my 500GB drives, and after like 10 hours of scanning, it pulled up all the data that I had lost.

After going through what it found, I saw that most of the stuff was just directories. . .but after further investigating, I starting finding all of the media that was lost. I attempted to recover one 5GB section, then PC Inspector freezes up and quits. I opened it again to check and see if I had to rescan the drive. . .and it looked like I was going to have to. There was no way I was going to wait another 10 hours and have the possibility that the app would crash again.

So I have admitted defeat. . .I gave up. Instead of spending time trying to restore the lost partition, I decided to spend it re-ripping media. I figured just settle with the loss and learn from my mistake. At least I had 1 drive that wasn’t lost(it’s an IDE drive and the Drobo is for SATA only).