Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive on Mac

it may not have been caused by anything more than mac os - and/or seagate.
google - the more more specific the better you'll do. include seagate HD model, any error messages in quotes, etc.
i'd still try another mac - same exact conditions.
Also, try without other peripherals (hub, devices - firewire usb)
That's all i can think of.
Good luck.
 
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.

So... 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.
 
Thanks to everyone for this thread. I had the exact problem described: Seagate external drive (1.4G) that the Mac OS wouldn't completely partition and format to HFS+. I have the Windows 7 RC1 bootcamp on my MacBook Pro. I deleted the partition using Windows 7. Mac OS then partitioned the HD properly. I'm sure any version would do the trick. Take Care.
 
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...

1. 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).

3. 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". 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.

5. Download HexFiend from one of these websites...
http://www.ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22589

6. 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". Click "File->Save As..." and call it 'newmbr'.

7. In the terminal window again, run "dd if=newmbr of=/dev/disk#" (remember to use your disk number from step 2).

8. 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.

9. Your done! 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...
is pure BS.
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 the 2 TB (1.8) version for Windows. The reason why it wasn't working for you guys is becauseyou have to change the partition map type.

Go into Disk Utility:
Select the Drive
Select Partitions
Create 2 of equal size (Mac OS Journaled)
Select Options
Select Partition Map
Select GUID Map (If you are on an Intel MAC) **This is what kills the MBR and DOS format**
Click Apply
After complete go back to partitions and create 1 partition.
 
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.
 
As of today Jan 7th, 2010, and a new 1TB seagate external (for PC) from newegg, I had to partition into 3rds and then change options to "apple partition map". Hit apply. Now, go back and ERASE using mac journaled.
Cheers.
 
I was having trouble under 10.5.8. When I switched to my macbook running 10.6.2, it formatted on the first try. Apparently Snow Leopard does the trick.
 
Wow i just plugged it in to my mac and it recognized it although i am running snow leopard witch can see ntfs out the box i still reformatted it with no problems to mac os x journaled The box says windows only but hardware doesn't discriminate the main problem is that seagate shouldn't have formatted the drive when they sent it out and should just put the drivers and stuff on a cd but they were being cheap works wonderful on my mac and for only 70 bucks who can complain
 
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!
 
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