Recovering a Seagate Central

[tyronebiggums]

So, I had a basic 2tb Seagate Central NAS that the ethernet port failed on; get the blinking red LED. I've tried all of the troubleshooting steps Seagate has on their site without any luck. I'm guessing the only way to recover my stuff off of it is to buy a new unit and swap the hard drives. Has anyone dealt with this before and is there any known way to retrieve my date off of the drive?

Once I recover my data, then I can start work on creating a FreeNAS box...

 

[anodos]

So, I had a basic 2tb Seagate Central NAS that the ethernet port failed on; get the blinking red LED. I've tried all of the troubleshooting steps Seagate has on their site without any luck. I'm guessing the only way to recover my stuff off of it is to buy a new unit and swap the hard drives. Has anyone dealt with this before and is there any known way to retrieve my date off of the drive?

Once I recover my data, then I can start work on creating a FreeNAS box...

The drive is probably ext3 or ext4 formatted. Just pull the drive out of the enclosure and stick it in a Linux box as secondary hard drive.

 

[Ericloewe]

Anodos has a point, but some of these things actually encrypted the dammed drive because... Reasons.

I think there was an article about a successful recovery of something like this on Ars Technica some two years ago. May have been Engadget or Anandtech, though.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Once I recover my data, then I can start work on creating a FreeNAS box...

Reading between the lines here, it seems like you didn't have a backup of the data on your Seagate Central.

I feel compelled to remind you that, while those of us who choose FreeNAS do so largely because of the reliability of the ZFS filesystem, it is not in any sense a substitute for having backups of your important data.

 

[anodos]

Anodos has a point, but some of these things actually encrypted the dammed drive because... Reasons.

I think there was an article about a successful recovery of something like this on Ars Technica some two years ago. May have been Engadget or Anandtech, though.

Wow. That's nuts. I don't encrypt drives unless I have a damned good reason to do it (because of the inherent risk of data loss). I wonder what sort of thought process leads to making it a default setting on a consumer device.

 

[Ericloewe]

Wow. That's nuts. I don't encrypt drives unless I have a damned good reason to do it (because of the inherent risk of data loss). I wonder what sort of thought process leads to making it a default setting on a consumer device.

Yeah. Some external drives do that by default, as do some of the budget NAS units.

It's just a random move by a bureaucracy with no goal other than seemingly innovating.

 

[tyronebiggums]

From what I've read, the file format is EXT4. I don't have any parts to build a Linux PC anymore and I'm almost illiterate when it comes to Linux/Unix. I'm more of a hardware & infrastructure kind of guy so I'm glad that I can set up FreeNAS using a GUI and use plugins. With that said, I think it'll be cheaper and easier for me to swap the hard drive in a new unit.

 

[pirateghost]

From what I've read, the file format is EXT4. I don't have any parts to build a Linux PC anymore and I'm almost illiterate when it comes to Linux/Unix. I'm more of a hardware & infrastructure kind of guy so I'm glad that I can set up FreeNAS using a GUI and use plugins. With that said, I think it'll be cheaper and easier for me to swap the hard drive in a new unit.

You don't have to 'build' a Linux pc.

Burn a live distro to USB/DVD

Boot to it

Copy files

Do happy dance for it not being that complicated