Need serial access to Seagate GoFlex Home ..but no pins

[dips0502]

I installed Arch Linux ARM on the Seagate GoFlex Home device and it had served me well for close to 2 years. However, over time pacman got messed up. I felt the need to just reinstall the OS again. However, I messed it up. On rebooting the device, the green LED flashes and then no LED at all. I cannot access the device over the network. Now, searching on the net for possible solutions led me to believe the device could still be debugged using serial access. However on opening up the device, the pins I was expecting to see for GND,TX,RX are just not there on the unit that I have. Here is the pic

There aren't even proper holes, were I had expected the pins to be. Some of the holes are filled already. I am no electronics guy. I have no clue what needs to be done now. Help please! Is serial access somehow still possible?

[WarheadsSE]

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3397

[dips0502]

Thanks for the link. I had gone through the link before. All I can take from that link is the fact that, that unit too had no pins and the pins needed to be soldered. But me being no electronics guy am unable to understand clearly what is required. Plus my unit has some holes already soldered in. So do I need to remove the solder and then re-solder them with pins is what I am specifically asking.

[moonman]

Did you mess with uboot? If you didn't you might be able to just use netconsole without serial.

[dips0502]

I didn't mess with the uboot. I hadn't configured netconsole. Is it still possible to access the device?

[hydro]

Even though it's not obvious what you mean by reinstalling the OS (go through the entire install guide or just unpack a fresh tarball to a USB or SATA device), I'd put the current legacy (not kirkwood, because your bootloader might be too old) tarball on an USB flash drive (see moonmans guide for example) and boot the goflexhome with only that USB drive attached (no SATA). If you still cannot SSH, examine the journal on the USB drive.

[dips0502]

I was attempting to unpack a fresh tarball to the SATA drive.

[hydro]

Okay, so chances are you took the kirkwood tarball that contains a current kernel while the U-Boot, that you had installed 2 years ago, can only boot kernel < 3.2 (I found an old thread about it, here is another). So if you can somehow mount the SATA drive on another computer directly you could extract the armv5te tarball to it instead. If not, use an USB flash drive as described. I have no experience with Jeffs U-Boot on the GoFlex Home, though, so I cannot guarantee it will boot from USB.

[dips0502]

I have mounted the drive externally and can see that the uImage is of Linux -3.14.4-1-ARCH

[hydro]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dips0502', 'I') have mounted the drive externally