Seagate Hard drive Mac

November 24, 2009 9:10 AM

How to get a Seagate FreeAgent Desk external hard drive to work with my Mac?

I have this model: Link.

The drive came without any installation disks. Apparently compatible only with Windows.

How do I get this working with Mac OSX? Help!

posted by yegga to computers & internet (8 answers total)

There is nothing to install as far as I can imagine.

Just fire up /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and erase the disk as a Mac OS X partition. (Or whatever partition style you want.)
posted by krilli at 9:16 AM on November 24, 2009

I will warn you of this: I had some Seagate drives that came with USB cords that, for some strange reason, worked fine on my Windows PC but not on my Mac. I would plug the drive into the Mac and nothing would happen. I called Seagate about it and they wanted me to return the entire drive, but in desperation I checked the cable and it started to work.

However, Mac OSX can read the partitions which these drives normally come with (I'm blanking now on if it's FAT32 or NTFS). As stated above, though, you can partition the drive as OS X if you want to repartition to a mac native format (but then the drive will only be Mac Readable; in their default partition they can be read by both).
posted by arniec at 9:24 AM on November 24, 2009

arniec: "However, Mac OSX can read the partitions which these drives normally come with (I'm blanking now on if it's FAT32 or NTFS). "
I believe OS X can read and write FAT32, although it will have the same limitations of all FAT32 partitions (files <4>
It can read NTFS, but not write (unless you install MacFuse and even then NTFS writing is very slow and quirky).

I agree reformatting to HFS+ with Disk Utility is the best option.
posted by sharkfu at 9:32 AM on November 24, 2009

oops, should be "files < 4 GB"
posted by sharkfu at 9:45 AM on November 24, 2009

I had to go through some extra installation magic to get my SeaGate to work with my Mac. I thought I had the directions bookmarked, but it seems that I've lost them. I'll keep digging. It was really simple to just follow the directions, and I have been able to use it with various Mac laptops since without any problems. I know I found the directions with a simple Google search...
posted by runningwithscissors at 10:31 AM on November 24, 2009

I have this exact drive and did nothing special to get it to work with my iMac. Just plug it in with a USB cord and you should be good to go. I would reformat it as krilli mentioned, though, just so it works as well as it can.
posted by pdb at 10:34 AM on November 24, 2009

Could it be this simple?
posted by runningwithscissors at 10:36 AM on November 24, 2009

This may be too obvious but did the drive come with a power adapter?
posted by 6550 at 11:21 AM on November 24, 2009