Converting a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud to a FreeNAS Device

[wladimird]

Hello, guys! Sorry if I'm being too newbie (and for my english)...

For a few years I've been using a 4TB NAS from Seagate (the Personal Cloud, as they call it) but, recently, it stopped working - I guess something happened to its disk during a boot process after a power outage. The fact is that I've not got success on recovering the data from it (maybe a reset attempt deleted the files) and, now, I'm wondering what would be possible to to with it.

I've heard about FreeNAS a while ago and decided to contact this community to verify if it's somehow possible to convert my unit into a FreeNAS device. Its current state is that it normally boots up, I can connect to it via local ethernet through its IP address on a web browser (so I think there's something installed in a chip on its tiny board or even a boot partition in the NAS HDD - speaking of it, it's a 4TB Seagate ST 4000VN000), but no disk information or content is displayed.

I have no experience in Linux, but tried to connect the HDD to a Raspberry Pi OS and, using GParted GUI interface, after showing me messages like "invalid argument while seek for read" and "the backup GPT table is corrupt, but the primary appears OK", the application shows the device with only an unallocated 1.64 GB space (where whoud be the rest of the 4 TB space?).

As you see, before getting the answer to the question regarding the topic title, I have a problem with the NAS HDD. If indeed it's not possible to convert it to a FreeNAS device, at leat it would be possible to get back its entire capacity and turn it into a normal HDD external drive?

Thank you all for reading. Have a nice week!

 

[Arwen]

TrueNAS, Core or SCALE, requires a complete computer to function. TrueNAS does not run a non-x64 hardware, like a Raspberry Pi. Nor on embedded computers, (again like a Raspberry Pi.) Further, it helps to have a bit more experience with computers than standard desktop use. Otherwise, problems can occur, including data loss.

So:

• What computer, (please list specifications), were you intending to use for TrueNAS?
• What physical interface is your 4TB hard drive?

Those that choose TrueNAS, choose it because of data protection. So many of use use Mirrors or RAID-Zx, which require multiple disks.

As for getting the full capacity of your 4TB hard drive, without Unix type experience, I can't really help you.