Need help with a Seagate 1.5 TB Free agent External HD

[echo13791]

Basically, it worked on my PC and not my mac. It was only readable on my mac, but I could not write to it. I went to this forum:

"Free Agent" cannot be modified - FreeAgent Products - Seagate Community Forums

And used the erase function using OS X's disc utility, and now my mac and PC cannot read or write to it (sigh). I found something later on in the topic which hopefully will work, but I cannot even try it yet because my computers aren't even reading the drive. How do I restore the drive to it's original state.

One quick thing to note is that my PC cannot look at the files on the drive, nor can does it show up in my computer under drives, but under the 'safely remove hardware' button on my task-bar it shows up. Also, when I plug it into my mac it says that this drive cannot be read by this computer, meaning that it knows it's there, but it's just messed up, heh. Any help would be really appreciated.

 

[dipique]

Go to Start-Run and type in "compmgmt.msc"

Go to "disc management" and see if the volume shows up.

Dan

 

[echo13791]

Go to Start-Run and type in "compmgmt.msc"

Go to "disc management" and see if the volume shows up.

Dan

On the left side all I see is:

Computer Management (Local)
System Tools
Storage
Removable Storage
Services and Applications

Obviously there are many other tabs within those, but I cannot find my Seagate within them. Am I not looking carefully? Where should I look? Thanks

Under disk defragmenter it only shows my C drive and one called Tengen, which is a different external HD, so I guess it's not showing up

wait, under disk management I see 2 drives that have no name.

They say:

Layout: Partition
Type: Basic
File System: One has FAT (top one) and other has nothing
Status: top one has Healthy (EISA Configuration) and bottom one has Healthy (Unknown Partition)
Capacity: top is 39 MB bottom is 1397.26 GB
% Free: top is 82 percent and bottom is 100 percent
Fault Tolerance: both are no
Overhead: Both are zero percent

Excuse the large amount of posting, heh. Thanks for the help

 

[carnageX]

Please use the edit button instead of multi-posting, thank you.

Anyway, does the 1397GB one have a black bar on top of it? If so, then it's unformatted. Right click it > choose to format.

Be aware that if you format it as NTFS your Mac won't be able to recognize it unless you install a 3rd-party NTFS driver on your Mac; you'll have to format it as Fat32 for both Windows/Mac to read it without any extras.

 

[echo13791]

There is no black bar over it in the disk management section of storage

 

[carnageX]

Can you please take a screenshot of your Disk Management screen and post it?

 

[echo13791]

http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z85/echo13791/Photo225.jpg

excuse the quality; I took the picture with my mac laptop.

 

[carnageX]

TO do a screenshot:

Select the window you want to take a screenshot of. Press PrntScrn button on your keyboard. Open up Paint or another image editing software (for this example we'll use Paint). Edit > Paste (or Ctrl+V). Save the image (File > Save as...) > Save as a JPG or PNG.

 

[dipique]

You may have to assign a drive letter to it. To do that right click it and select drive letter (or something like that.. in Windows 7 it's "Change Drive Letter and Paths").

Dan

 

[hikaricloud]

It sounds like it was originally NTFS formatted, which would most likely be true seeing as most all external Seagate drives come that way.

As Carnage said, you have to format it as FAT32, otherwise you can't use it in OSX.