• Seagate Freeagent Desk External Drive
• Seagate Freeagent Go Driver
• Seagate Freeagent Desk I Freeagent Goflex For Mac Software

I have several other FreeAgent drives purchased over the past few years. Some are USB 'Windows' drives and others USB/Firewire/eSATA and Firewire only. I've never had a problem formatting any of them. Today I bought a new (white) 1TB FreeAgent Desk.

I had the same issue you mention. The drive came formatted as FAT and would re-format as FAT or any of the Windows formats but would fail doing a single Mac OS partition of any kind. Formatted capacity on the drive is 931.5GB. What eventually worked was setting up a 930GB partition and a 1.5GB partition - both Mac OS Extended Journaled.

I have yet to figure out how to unformat the 1.5GB partition so it won't mount so, at the moment I have a rather useless little partition mounting, but the main partition is nearly as big as it should be. The Drive Genius idea is an interesting one, but considering you need to spend $100 in order to use it to partition a drive, it would be cheaper to spend the extra bucks on the Mac version. By the way, the 1TB USB 2.0 drive cost $119.95 at Frys today. A Mac USB 2.0/FW800 drive was 159.95. May be worth the money for the faster interface and no hassles.

This doesn't seem like an intentional move by Seagate, More like some little software glitch. I know an exec at Seagate. I'll see if I can get an answer from him. After weighing the alternatives, I bit the bullet and purchased Drive Genius today. It's software I should own, considering what I do for a living, an the fact that I have at least ten external drives for various Macs. I bought a license for $99. And yes, it does handily format the FreeAgent Desk USB 2.0 'windows' version drive into a single Mac OS Extended Journaled partition.

Very nice software actually. Here's a marginally related word to the wise about external drives, Seagate included: Make sure you're using the correct power supply. Most external drives these days that use a coaxial power connector require 12VDC on that connector. They also require adequate power out of the power supply. Using a supply built for a smaller drive may not work on larger drives. For example I have a Maxtor 1.5 TB external drive from about a year and a half ago.

It contains two 750GB disk drives and requires a 3 amp 12VDC power supply. The smaller 2 amp power supply provided with a FreeAgent drive doesn't provide enough power to get the 2 drives in the Maxtor chassis spinning. I have easily a dozen 12VDC coaxial connector power supplies collected over the years. The polarity of all of them is the same, but they vary in output current from 1.2 amps to 4 amps.

The 4A supply will power any drive I have. I have one FreeAgent drive that worked well for two years on the 2A supply that came with it.

Then it stopped mounting. If I connect it to the 3A power supply from the Maxtor, the drive mounts right up. I have to assume that the FreeAgent drive is physically requiring more start current to get it spinning now than it did when it was new. The lesson here is, if you have a drive that's getting flaky, only mounting part of the time, try connacting it to a higher current power supply. I'm sure I could simplify this procedure, but this is what I did, and it worked, so I'm just going to keep it the same. No purchase of any fancy software required.

Connect your Seagate drive that only works in Windows 2. Open Disk Utility and 'unmount' the partition (do not eject). Highlight the Seagate drive and click the 'i' Info button at the top. Note where it says 'Disk Identifier: disk#' (mine was disk2). Open a Terminal Window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app 4. Run the following command 'dd if=/dev/disk# of=mbr count=100'. 'if' means 'input filename'; 'of' means 'output filename'.

Seagate Freeagent Desk External Drive

Fill in the '#' with your disk number from step 2. The 'count=100' is just to be sure we grabbed enough. We don't actually need 100 blocks, but it doesn't matter.

Download HexFiend from one of these websites. Open the file 'mbr' in HexFiend. Note that most everything is '00000000', except a handful of other 'cells'. These must be blocking MacOSX DiskUtility from being able to repartition. Replace anything in the beginning that's not '00000000' with '00000000'.

Seagate Freeagent Go Driver

Click 'File-Save As.' And call it 'newmbr'. In the terminal window again, run 'dd if=newmbr of=/dev/disk#' (remember to use your disk number from step 2). Now you can open DiskUtility again and repartition the drive just as you should have been able to do if Seagate wasn't blatantly trying to milk Apple's customers by charging more money for the same thing.

Enjoy your cheaper 'Windows-only' Seagate hard drive. Tried all the previous posts until I got to the Drive Genius resourcing and that was out of the question as it came up as U$99 in google. I was with a friend on the phone all the time, who found in another forum a post which lead me to, after trying partitioning and always coming back with the failed on exit error, this: Choose Partition in one big partition by the dropping down menu, click in Options, the option clicked should come up as the last one (cant remember now name, sorry) change that to the GUID (first of the 3 options) then clik apply then follow to erase, that did it for me. I'm at this moment backing up with Time Machine, al brilliant! Agree with gd6778: I bought a Seagate 500GB a couple of years ago, it was smooth on the PC and smooth on the Mac, but whatever they did to this model. Especifications on product info do not warn you as this being a PC only, and even when you open the box it does send you to the Seagate support site where instructions are assuming you ll be able to format. Thanks to you guys, Google and my very, very patient friend on the phone.

I have a Mac Pro, Intel, running OS X 10.5.8, and do not plan to run Windows on this machine. I purchased a 1.4TB FreeAgent Desk 'PC version' external drive thinking it would be simple to reformat. After trying many of the alternative suggestions involving repartitioning, I almost settled for the '1 large functional Mac OS extended/journaled partition and 1 small-as-possible non-functional partition' solution, but decided to give it one more try. I stumbled upon the GUID Table selection under the partitioning 'options' and went for a single partition.

This also resolved the problem for me as well (I should have read all the replies to the original post in the first place!). This doesn't sound like a good solution for people that want to read the drive with Windows also, however.

Seagate Freeagent Desk I Freeagent Goflex For Mac Software

Tonight I just got home and installed the software from the Seagate onto my harddrive. That was a bad idea. Spent hours trying to get my harddrive back from a sudden death incident: computer couldn't power up past the blue screen and the disk kept spinning forever. I think my gf hates me now, from my rage against the machine.

As someone earlier posted, uninstall the Seagate program entirely. Don't just delete the program, but really uninstall everything down to the prefs. Restart your machine, and hopefully you'll be fine. If you plan on using the Seagate, do not use their software!

I have this drive: which says on it 'Auto backup, encrypt and sync software for PC'.There is also a Mac version here: I don't have my mac yet, it's on it's way. I wanted to know if I can just use my current 'for pc' drive in my mac if I connect it up and format it? I can't tell if the difference between the pc and mac versions is just to do with how they are pre formatted and the software that comes with them, or if i can just format the pc version with my mac and use that. Basically, I just want my music and videos on a portable drive that I can move between my mac and pc. Is there a better way?