Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in:

  • They were automatically detected
  • Partitions/File Systems understood
  • Desktop systems would prompt for actions

The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were:

[56063.268107] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 13 using ehci_hcd[56063.401635] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=14cd, idProduct=6116[56063.401645] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=3, SerialNumber=2[56063.401652] usb 1-1: Product: USB 2.0 SATA BRIDGE [56063.401658] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Super Top [56063.401663] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: M6116018VF16[56063.402857] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0[56064.400896] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD50 00BEVT-24A0RT0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0[56064.401576] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0[56064.402102] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)[56064.402615] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off[56064.402618] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00[56064.403101] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.403105] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.404861] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.404864] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.419657] sdb: sdb1[56064.421850] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present[56064.421854] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[56064.421857] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

But for my Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex HDD, things were different. The kernel would detect but then it would not mount. The error reported is that the device is busy. My FreeAgent’s kernel messages look similar to what the regular one has:

[ 168.520140] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd[ 168.657424] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=5021[ 168.657433] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3[ 168.657439] usb 1-1: Product: FreeAgent GoFlex[ 168.657444] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Seagate[ 168.657449] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: NA0C1BML[ 168.659079] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0[ 169.657136] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct- Access Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4[ 169.708786] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0[ 169.709079] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)[ 169.709954] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off[ 169.709963] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00[ 169.710567] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA[ 169.759942] sdc: sdc1[ 169.762050] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

As the Device Mapper Multipath Debian Maintainer, I have multipath-tools installed on my laptop. Turns out, for some reason, the device is consumer by the device mapper multipath stack.

20:12:58 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/mapper/1Seagate@ 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Np1 control LocalDisk-ROOT@ LocalDisk-SWAP@

Also the block device ID listing is enumerated as type SCSI.

19:56:44 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/disk/by-id/ata- HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ata- HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ata- HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ata- HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ata-HL-DT- ST_DVDRAM_GU10N_M189CNI1127@ scsi- SSeagate_FreeAgent_GoFle_NA0C1BML@ ata-ST1000LM010-9YH146_W1000ZD8@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0@ **dm-name-1Seagate@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0-part1@**dm-name-LocalDisk-ROOT@ wwn-0x5000c5003d19c8c2@dm-name-LocalDisk-SWAP@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc@dm-uuid-LVM- buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3D5DepV8w8nLrHfoAjIIQVnakOQJZEqJX@ wwn- 0x5000cca586e112bc-part1@dm-uuid-LVM- buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3k9aJfc9B7wRmVIwfoagffHUZjuN6c4cM@ wwn- 0x5000cca586e112bc-part2@ dm-uuid-mpath-1Seagate@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part3@ raid-1Seagate@

But I’m not sure why the same doesn’t happend for my external laptop drive. It gets properly tagged as device type USB.

So Laptop or Server, if you have a FreeAgent that you want to connect to your machine, and see the device busy error when accessing the device[’s] directly, do the following:

First, the ID of the device.

20:17:43 rrs@champaran:~$ /lib/udev/scsi_id –whitelisted –page=0x83 –device=/dev/sdc1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N

Add the ID to /etc/multipath.conf under blacklist section

blacklist { wwid “1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex*” wwid “1Seagate FA GoFlex Desk*”# devnode “^(ram|raw|loop|fd|md|dm-|sr|scd|st)[0-9]”# devnode “^hd[a-z][[0-9]]”# device {# vendor DEC.*# product MSA[15]00# }}

Run mulitpath -F to flush the unused maps.

Run multipath -v3 to ensure that now the device is blacklisted.

Nov 03 20:19:02 | sdc: (Seagate:FreeAgent GoFlex) wwid blacklisted

The front cause for the mis-behavior is:

Coalesce multipath devices before multipathd is running (initramfs, early#

boot)ACTION==“add|change”, SUBSYSTEM==“block”, RUN+="/sbin/multipath -v0 /dev/$name"

But something else, maybe the default blacklist table, needs the actual fix.


See also