Connect computer to external hard-drive using ethernet port

Question

I have an old Seagate Central external hard-drive which has a USB-A and Ethernet port. It's meant to be connected to a router and accessed remotely; with the USB-A port used for chaining an additional drive.

I don't have access to connect the drive to my router though and I don't have a USB-A to USB-A cable at the moment to try that. I do have an Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter so I've tried running an ethernet cable directly to my computer from the drive. In the network settings I activated the port and it immediately self-assigned itself an IP.

It showed up in the Finder sidebar but any attempt to open it in Finder fails.

I'm thinking that perhaps the port configuration is not correct or I need to be using a crossover-cable (I have some spare connectors I can swap out and make it a cross-over cable but not gonna do it unless I'm sure that's the problem).

Solution

Thanks to David's comment I figured out how to make it work.

I first activated the DHCP service within OSX using the command sudo /bin/launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist

Once that was done, in the network system preferences I set it to manual and filled in the fields with default values.

Then it worked.

Comments

[David Schwartz]

You need to configure the drive. If it's configured to get its IP address using DHCP, you need to configure a DHCP server on your machine. Having your interface configured to DHCP will only work if the drive is a DHCP server, which seems very unlikely.

[davidcondrey]

To disable the DHCP service sudo /bin/launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist