Inaccessible Seagate GoFlex Home

Not been here for some time, but it's nice to see that the site is still active and bodhi is still sharing his great knowledge...

I'm trying to recover a Seagate GoFlex Home unit which I messed up some time ago. The problem was that I mixed up two units, one which accesible by a serial cable and one which wasn't, and I made a mistake with my envars and now it doesn't boot and I don't know of any way of accessing it.

Yesterday I did discover that the system would boot with a Debian USB stick inserted.... Without the stick it would go though a boot cycle with the Green LED flashing for 13 secs before switching off for 3 secs before resuming the cycle. With the Debian USB stick the Green LED flashes for 21 secs before changing to a steady Orange for 11 secs before changing to a steady Green where it stays. My DHCP server does not seem to assign an IP address so I am unable to access it, although the LEDs on the NIC are constantly flashing. To me, it looks as though the system has actually booted, and i was wondering if there was anything I could do with the Debian installation to add a start up routine which would output some msg to a flle which I could examine on another device. I'm not familiar with Debian and don't how uBoot invokes Debian and whether I can run a script to assign a static IP address which I could subsequently ping.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

balanga,

> Yesterday I did discover that the system would
> boot with a Debian USB stick inserted.... Without
> the stick it would go though a boot cycle with the
> Green LED flashing for 13 secs before switching
> off for 3 secs before resuming the cycle. With the
> Debian USB stick the Green LED flashes for 21 secs
> before changing to a steady Orange for 11 secs
> before changing to a steady Green where it stays.

Yes, the kernel has booted. Now, we cannot be sure the rootfs was running successfully or not. There might be errors on the file system.

> My DHCP server does not seem to assign an IP
> address so I am unable to access it, although the
> LEDs on the NIC are constantly flashing. To me, it
> looks as though the system has actually booted,
> and i was wondering if there was anything I could
> do with the Debian installation

Add static IP to see if you can log in. Bring the Debian USB stick to another Linux or BSD box. Do a fsck to see if there is any error on this rootfs.

And mount it. Assuming it is mounted at /media/sdb1.

Edit /media/sdb1/etc/network/interfaces file to use static IP. Example of my network (192.168.0.1 is my router, 192.168.0.224 is my GoFlex Home).

/media/sdb1/etc/network/interfaces

auto lo eth0
iface lo inet loopback
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.224
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.0.1

-bodhi
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Many thanks, bodhi, I have it working now, to my great relief.

Just wondering... if I want to use the unit with a 3.5 in disk, do I just copy all the files from the USB stick to the disk and maybe change labels and somesuch, or should I continue to boot from the USB stick and add a mount point in /etc/fstab for the hard disk?

balanga,

> Just wondering... if I want to use the unit with a
> 3.5 in disk, do I just copy all the files from the
> USB stick to the disk and maybe change labels and
> somesuch, or should I continue to boot from the
> USB stick and add a mount point in /etc/fstab for
> the hard disk?

Using the hardisk for rootfs is always better if you dedicate it to the GFHome and has no plan to unplug it.

OTOH, if you want a flexibility of using HDD for data only and being able to remove it at will, then keep booting with USB, and create a swap file on HDD.

-bodhi
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