Restoring a Seagate Personal Cloud SRN21C with dead HDD?

[Galane]

What I need to find is a *complete* image of a 3TB drive from a Seagate Personal Cloud SRN21C.
I bought one off eBay, used, cheap. It arrived with the HDD bad, despite being "tested" and a wall wart different than pictured. It had also obviously been pried open. I got a refund and got to keep it.

Then I opened it to find the drive had been removed and replaced, the EMI shield tape was pulled loose. Most likely a previous owner attempted to recover data. I found an "open box" drive of the exact same model, Seagate ST3000VN000 on eBay and it's on its way to me.

I did try HDDrawcopy on the bad HDD but gave up after seeing a huge number of errors.

I have found some incomplete images from this model of NAS and have tried them on a 1TB drive. The NAS works but it's missing the data partition. There's fixes for that to create a new partition. But these images are also missing something that enables seeing the NAS OS version number and installing the OS updates. That page of the web GUI just shows an error. None of the three partial images I've found are the final update, or even the next to final update. Seagate still has the last two updates available to download. What would be nice is if they had a full NAS OS installer for this one, like they do for their other NAS models that are not the Personal Cloud line.

A 3TB drive from this NAS, with no user files, and clean reset, should produce a full image file that will RAR or 7Zip down to a couple of gigs. The incomplete images are compressed to about 1.5 gig archives. 900 or so gigs of empty partition should compress to almost nothing since it should be mostly zeroes.

I know there's Debian and other Linux ports for this but by all accounts I've seen, they're much slower than the native Seagate NAS OS because they don't have a hardware specific driver for accessing the NAS' hard drive.

I'm wanting to use this only as a DLNA server. I can disable all its functions except DLNA and SMB, that's all a DLNA server needs to present video and audio files to client devices that can play them using client side capabilities. Then SMB to mount it as a network drive on a Windows PC to push files to the server. For the Personal Cloud product line, since Seagate shut down their online service to remotely access files, being a local NAS, TimeMachine, and/or DLNA server is all they're good for.

 

[Galane]

Here's the detailed, leaving nothing out, clear, step by step instructions, in English, for how to put a new drive into a Seagate Personal Cloud model SRN21C.

To put a new drive into a one drive Seagate Personal Cloud model SRN21C, use HDDRawCopy1.10Portable.exe to write the image to the drive while it's directly connected to your PC or via a USB 3.x or C to SATA adapter. Download this image https://drive.google.com/file/d/19L7TZrSWBVMrsqXBwY8rQsn9wIu0L4r7/view
It's a 7Zip archive. 7Zip or WinRAR can extract it.

Put the drive into the NAS then hold the Reset button followed by plugging in power. Hold the Reset button until you see the red LED flash. Wait for the LED to change to steady white.

To enter setup on the NAS, in Windows Explorer, under Network > Storage, you should see PersonalCloud (not PERSONALCLOUD under Computer). Doubleclick and your default web browser will open to the login page, with the NAS IP address in the Location or Address bar. Make a note of that IP address. Go through the setup, don't disable or change any of the Services, then logout. You have to enter an email address, your NAS user name is the part of the email address before the @ symbol.

Copy and paste the link below into a browser, then login to the Seagate Personal Cloud. After clicking Show advanced settings, go to Services under Customize. Scroll down to the bottom to enable SSH. The only option under Advanced settings for SSH is changing the port, which is at 22 so don't change it.

http://personalcloud.local/?locale=en&appdev=1#device_manager-services (If your language is other than English, change the locale=en to your two letter code, for example ru for Russian.)

Logout of the NAS then use PuTTY to login using the NAS IP address. Use the username and password you entered when setting up the NAS. The Personal Cloud does not have a "root" account accessible this way.

run sudo -i to log in with the user name and password you used during the web GUI setup. Any ask for a password during the SSH session, it's that password.

run anyraid -c vg to build the raid partition

Quit PuTTY when it returns to the prompt.

Enter the NAS IP address in a web browser, go to Storage. Click on Network Drive then the big Format button. When it's done formatting go to Settings.

To finish the install of the new drive, you need to download two updates from Seagate from https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/request.html?userPreferredLocaleCookie=en_US_

Enter the serial number of the NAS (found on the label on the bottom of the case and in Settings), check the box, and select your country.

Download both of the updates listed at the top. 4.1.9.1 and 4.3.19.7 Unzip each to a separate folder. Renaming the 4.1.9.1 folder to 1st and the 4.3.19.17 folder to 2nd will avoid getting the update order wrong.

In Settings, click Manual Update. Select the 4.1.9.1 folder and after it's done you'll be back at Settings and can immediately install the 4.3.19.7 update. If the menu "hamburger button" vanishes after applying the 4.3.19.17 update, restart the NAS. If the menu is still not there, do a factory reset and set it up again.

Now you can go to services to disable everything that wants to communicate to the Internet because none of it works due to Seagate shutting down their service that allowed remote access. If all you're using it for is a DLNA server, disable all services except UPnP / DLNA and SMB (If you use a Mac, enable AFP, and Time Machine if you want to use it for backups.)

Under Maintenance Notifications, turn off Email notifications because it cannot do that thanks to Seagate's shutting down the remote access service.

Congratulations! You have successfully saved a Network Attached Storage and DLNA server box from becoming ewaste.

To map the Public folder as a network drive in Windows, launch Windows Explorer. Scroll down to Network, right click it, then click Map network drive. Click Browse and find the Public folder. Click it, select the drive letter you want, then click OK. If it gives you an error, try again, it will most likely work the second time. If you see nothing in Browse, type \\PERSONALCLOUD\Public into the blank field in the Map network drive window. It will almost certainly give you an error. But then it should show up when you click Browse.

Mapping network drives on windows has been exactly this annoying since Windows 95. It's like waking up a heavy sleeper. "Hey! Wake up!" "Don' wanna!" "WAKE UP!" "Ok, ok, I'm awake!"