I’ve been generally happy with my Seagate Goflex Home NAS device. I purchased the 2TB model at COSTCO a year ago and have been running Acronis backups to it for the past eight months. I have Acronis configured such that incremental backups of all my computers are copied to the NAS six days a week and a full backup image is generated every Sunday. Recently backups on my Livingroom PC started failing in Acronis and after working with Acronis support it was determined that the best course of action would be to re-create the backup job (don’t even get me started on Acronis support).
I re-created the Acronis backup job for my Livingroom PC and ran a full backup, then decided to delete all the previous backups. While trying to delete one of these backups, I ran into an interesting problem with the Seagate Goflex Home NAS. I could delete the file using explorer, but the file would *magically* reappear seconds after I deleted it. After doing this a couple of times it became apparent that the file was stuck somehow.
I accessed the Seagate Dashboard and opened the Seagate web preferences window and checked to ensure that the NAS operating system software was up-to-date. It was up-to-date and no errors were logged in this interface whenever I attempted to delete this file using windows Explorer.
I then accessed the device storage folders using the web based interface and attempted to delete the file this way. When selecting Delete, the system threw a file system error deleting the file.
According to the support forums, the only option was to format the entire drive using the web preferences interface, but I did not want to lose all the other data on it. Copying data to and from this drive is extremely slow at 6-10mb/sec. So I ejected the drive from from the base and tried attaching it as a SATA drive to my PC. The idea was to run chkdsk on the drive to see if there were any recoverable file system errors chkdsk could fix. The problem I ran into with this idea is the proprietary drive enclosure. The thick plastic cover prevents most SATA and SATA POWER adapters from reaching the drive SATA connectors:
So I had to digg through my box-o-cables (yes every computer geek’s got one) to find some SATA power adapters narrow enough to fit past the plastic enclosure and reach the sata jack on the drive itself. The SATA cable itself needed some trimming work with an exacto knife but that ended up working quite nicely:
Next, I attached this drive to my PC’s motherboard and ran chkdsk on the disk volume which is surprisingly formatted as NTFS file system. Long behold, chkdsk found loads of problems and repaired them without harming the rest of my data. Now my NAS works like new again and I didn’t have to format the whole thing.
That’s it.
Can’t we connect it using USB to SATA connectors?
Yes you certainly could. If you had a usb-to-sata connector that fits the drive through its enclosure, you could certianly use that instead. As shown in the picture, I had to jerry rig even the standard molex sata power and sata plugs so all the usb-to-sata adapters I had would not fit the drive enclosure.
David,
thanks for the information. Its very useful. Unfortunately, I am also facing a similar issue but I don’t have a SATA cable. I also use a laptop to connect with the GoFlex home drive. Lastly, I will try to find a usb to Sata connector that allows me to connect to the drive directly, but in its absence do you have a different solution. For instance I can connect to the underlying linux OS as root but FSCK is unavailable and I don’t want to upgrade the linux system on the GoFlex
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Paaras.
Yea, hopefully it’s some standard flav. or microlinux with a published root password somewhere. That’d do it.
I had a flashing “amber” light on the drive the first day I got it. I bought and tried to use this usb-sata adapter – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005B3VO24/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00 – to see if I could connect it directly and chkdsk it or reformat it because the base would not recognize the drive (I connected another SATA directly to the base as well as an external usb drive and they both worked with the network interface so I know the NAS part works).
Unfortunately the product I bought ended up being too short to actually connect. Any ideas? Do you think I could cut the adapter to make it longer or would that damage it?
I already tried directly connecting the base to my laptop using the ethernet port as the Seagate forum says it should work, but nothing was recognized so I can’t even access the drive to run chkdsk that way.
Either way, the website I bought it from is exchanging it for a replacement (after I already spent literally 3 hours on hold with Seagate and then was unsuccessful in troubleshooting it with their tech support), but I’d just like to see something come out of my time spent reading forums, on the phone, and spending $20 on the adapter.
Thanks.
Its sad that you cant run chkdsk or that the web interface NAS interface does not have a built in checking tool etc. If you copy files from Linux or Mac systems to it, the permissions get carried over, and prevent you to delete or do too much with the files. Therein lies to the problems of locked files.
I have tried running chkdsk using a mapped drive it cant fix anything.
You can connect directly to the NAS drive base if you use a Crossover Ethernet Cable.
Its supplied cable wont do anything. You need either a router or crossover cable or crossover adaptor to make it work. Then you can get to it after that. The GOFLEX will then show up in Network devices
and also via WEB interface. You can purchase crossover cables and adapters at most computer stores.
Would have been nice if they would have supplied one with the unit.