Mount Seagate Central HDD on Ubuntu Linux


If you’ve got a Seagate Central network hard drive that developed some issues and you have removed the disk and plugged it into a drive enclosure for some recovery on Linux. Provided the drive is readable, you can save yourself some time trying to read it by:

  • install fuse2fs and lvm2
    • sudo apt install fuse2fs lvm2
  • Identify the correct logical volume to mount. The command lvscan will display all logical volumes attached to your system.

    • lvscan
      ACTIVE '/dev/vg1/lv1' [3.63 TiB] inherit
      This is an example of the output on my system that has no additional LVM devices. My Seagate central is a 4TB one on which the data partition is 3.63TB
  • You will not be able to mount this by using the usual methods for mounting an lvm partition on linux. I have not tried to find out why. Only fuse2fs can successfully mount this.
  • Create a directory into which you will mount the drive
    • mkdir ~/data
  • Mount the volume using fuse2fs
    • sudo fuse2fs /dev/vg1/lv1 ~/data/
  • Only root can read the drive though. You may have a better way of accessing this content, but I personally just ran nautilus (the default file manager in ubuntu) via sudo because I was desperate to get at my data and this was an otherwise empty Virtual Machine I created specifically for the purpose of recovery.
    • sudo nautilus /home/<your_home_dir_name>/data
  • Copy out your data and rejoice 🙂
    • Please feel free to tell me in the comments if you know a better way to access the mounted partition without running nautilus as root.


Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This site uses cookies, mainly to provide basic functionality and some analytics (so that I can see how busy the site is, and which pages are popular). By continuing to use this site, you have agreed to the use of cookies. You can close this window/tab if you do not wish to browse this site.