My Network-Attached Storage (NAS) died after telling me something like “CNID DB error… read only…”. It was a Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB unit that I never truly liked anyway. When I bought it, the point was to use it for TimeMachine — the network backup solution for Mac OS X, but it turned out to be slow and problematic. I ended up just using it to store movies for streaming and occasional non-critical file backup. I probably would have ignored it completely if not for it being able to stream movies via DLNA to my TVs.
Free download MySync for GoFlex Home MySync for GoFlex Home for Mac OS X. MySync for GoFlex Home - As a Seagate Share Pro subscriber, your GoFlex Home is enabled with MySync. Connect the GoFlex drive to the computer. Click Don't Use if a TimeMachine prompt appears. Double-click the GoFlex icon on the desktop (it may take a minute for the icon to appear). Double-click the Mac Install.dmg file. Double click MacInstall. Follow the Wizard and choose Mac and PC. Complete the installation wizard.
But then it died, taking all the movies I hadn’t watched yet with it.
Actually, it was only the hard drive that failed, but that’s where all the movies were. The disk just wouldn’t mount, no matter what I tried. I even found the secret SSH access and tried to force mount it. No dice. Maybe I just needed to run fsck, I thought, but there was no way to run it on this disk while it was attached to the NAS. So, I had to find instructions on how to remove the drive from the NAS case, with my plan being to install the drive in another computer where I’d be able to run some more diagnostics or use other tools to repair it.
Removing the drive took a little elbow grease, but after installing it in a linux server I have here, I noticed 2 things: the drive still wasn’t mountable because the device wasn’t even seen by the OS, and there was a faint beep coming from the hard drive every 1 or 2 seconds for the first 5 minutes after it powered up.
I searched the interwebs high and low for any idea what could be happening. I found a video of someone on youtube with exactly the same problem. There was mechanical failure and nothing I could do about it without spending a ton of cash for data recovery services.
So, what could I do with the GoFlex Home device? I also had a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external hard drive that I had to stop using because it had issues remounting after the computer spun it down. It’s been sitting on a shelf for at least a year, but the drive inside it should still be usable (assuming the remounting issue was because of the drive controller in the FreeAgent Desk enclosure). So I cracked the FreeAgent open — on my own with the elegance of an orangutan, pulled out the drive and pitched the broken enclosure in the recycling bin. Finally, I got a break; it turned out that the FreeAgent disk was a 1TB version of the 2TB disk that had failed in the GoFlex Home.
So I installed the 1TB drive into the GoFlex Home and powered it up. And it worked. Kind of.
![Download Download](/uploads/1/1/8/3/118301089/143033909.png)
The 1TB drive was formatted with HFS+, and the GoFlex didn’t like it very much. It took a few attempts at reformatting the disk using the GoFlex web console, but then it was only formatting the free space for some reason and showing me that there was only 600GB free. Sigh. So I tried the secret SSH access again, and was again stopped short because the linux build running on the GoFlex didn’t include the standard disk tools, and there was no way to install them without hacking the NAS and installing linux fresh.
And there happens to be instructions on the internet for exactly how to do this. The GoFlex Home is an ARMv5 device with plenty of capability to be a small linux server. It’s basically what it is before Seagate cripples it, anyway.
Installing ArchLinux on the GoFlex Home was easy as pie, and everything was working fine with the new-ish drive (recovered from another failed Seagate product) in the enclosure. The next part was to install FTP and netatalk to restore its NAS capability and then miniDLNA to restore its streaming capability.
Goflex Home Mac Download Cnet
![Home Home](/uploads/1/1/8/3/118301089/494558743.jpg)
Goflex Home Software
So far everything has been working fine, but the netatalk transfers have been very, very slow. I’ve been reading how Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion have been hardwired to limit the transfer speeds to netatalk servers that aren’t on Mac OS X Server. I’m hoping that’s not the case.