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.