External Hard drive

What a piece of crap

I bought a seagate 200gb external hd off of eBay for a steal. Ya...steal alright. It said it was for Mac 9.0 and above. I checked the software for the pc's...because it also said that the Mac wouldn't need any of the drivers on the disk...anyway....it's from 2003. It's USB connection, and one of the pins broke trying to connect. It glows green, blue and red...hey...I've 58 years old, and I don't need a spaceship for an external hard drive. Anyway, the pin broke off and the cord is useless....I don't even know what I can or want to do with it. Anyone want it cheap? Just needs a new usb cord. $50! I paid, like #$120 or something. Anyway, I want something easy, not sticking out...kind of small....at leat 200gb...any suggestions?

If the USB cable itself has a broken pin and not the connector on the drive, why don't you just replace the cable? You can get them pretty cheap online

It has a round connection with three pins on one side and two pins on the other...one pin broke from the three.....

jacintosh said:

It has a round connection with three pins on one side and two pins on the other...one pin broke from the three.....

Click to expand...

That almost sounds more like a power cord.

Sorry, it is the power cord. I'm not very up on all the terminology as it relates to external drives. So, is that also something that I can purchase? I just am concerned that when I installed the cd, nothing happened. I opened the disk, and it had a ton of folders...all including the same junk....they said I didn't need any of this because mac didn't need the drivers...but time machine couldn't find it.

Lacie mini hard drive

Okay....I've had this external drive hooked up to my MBP for almost 4 years, and on the page of cascading folders, shows three folders and they are all of the desktop...which is empty. I just don't get it.

jacintosh said:

Okay....I've had this external drive hooked up to my MBP for almost 4 years, and on the page of cascading folders, shows three folders and they are all of the desktop...which is empty. I just don't get it.

Click to expand...

Would you mind giving us more details about your problem? ;D

Plugged in my Lacie Mini drive and it asked it I wanted Time Machine to connect to the external drive. I did, and, after about 5 hours, there are five cascading folders of the desktop and that is it. About 1 folder per hour, and no actual files.

Time machine backs up every hour (by default)... you are clicking TimeMachine while you are focused on the Desktop... If you didn't have/change/delete a file o nthe desktop anytime during the last 5 hrs... then you will see now changes in the cascading windows within TimeMachine

To see some changes...

Open a window/folder of a file that you know has changes in it pretty regularly... now click time machine... you will see the last 5 hours in 1 hour increments of THAT folder.

So....if I just let it run for 5 hours....and the 5 folders saying desktop with nothing in it....means that it will only show any changes? Because when I manually open the folder, all the files are in there. I can see it when I view with cover flow. Should I delete four of those five hours? I'm not aggressively adding and deleting where I need hourly updates anyway.

A bad case of the dumbs

Well....the macie mini hard drive works slick as slick can be....go to an application...if there's been changes....click time machine...and BAM....there is your history of that application. It's fun just to play with it. I doubt that I'll be hooking it up everyday...but if I want to take some risks....it's nice to know that I can play it safe.....this mini is perfect for the mac mini...but it works nice with my MBP too. The colors totally match....I just need to get a longer firewire...the one that comes with it...is meant to hook up with a mini.

How do you reformat an external hard drive that is set up for a pc?

Use disk utility. Its in the utilities folder.

I bought an external hard drive for my son and I'm told I have to reformat the hard drive. Any suggestions?

Plug it into your computer and see if it reads.

unless there's stuff on it, just go ahead and reformat it

IF you don't know how to format a drive in OS X, in finder go up to "GO" and then down to UTILITIES and double click on the Diskutility icon, this will open disk utility, you can then select the drive you would like to format and click the Erase tab. You then can click erase and it'll format the drive for you.

Make sure you choose the correct file system for your needs, if you format in journaled it'll only be readable in OS X and linux, if you format the drive in Fat all platforms (windows, linux, OS X) will all be able to read the disk.

thank you...yes, it wouldn't play on my MBP...it's a Seagate....but, I bought a lacie mini....and it is slick...looks just like a Mac.

NOTE: Merged multiple crossposts

Hi, i was wondering if anyone can explain to me how to partition my new Seagate FreeAgent, for my mac, windows, and both (so i can transfer files between the two). so far i'm at the disk utilities, my volume scheme is at 3 partitions.
-my mac partition is set to Mac OS extended (journaled).
-my windows partition.., i don't know what i should put this to.
-both partition ..i don't know what to formate this too, i believe FAT32 but there is no FAT32 format.

Also what should my options be? MBR, Apple partition map, GUID?

and one more question...if i do this, whatever os i connect to, will it read the external without a problem?
thank you.