Formatting Seagate Goflex

I have purchased two 2TB Seagate goflex drives to move my music collection to, and have room to grow. I see that the drives come formatted NTFS and include the mac drivers from paragon. Is this a good way to go? I don't use windows currently, but some of my friends and family do, and I might want to share occassionally, as I plan to hook them up to PogoPlug in the future. If reformatting the drives, what is the recommended mac format to use? I see four different choices in the option box in the disc utility.

Oddly enough, I went through this exact same thing in December. My cheapo external drive died so I replaced it with a Goflex as the cost was right. The "supplied driver for Mac" put me off a bit, but the gentleman at Best Buy assured me I could reformat it and that they would accept a return if he was wrong.

Anyhow, just power it up and then connect it to your Mac. Open Disk Utility and select the Goflex on the left side pane. Then to the right side along the top you will see tabs for First Aid/Erase/RAID/Restore. Select Erase and then choose the "Format" drop down option that says "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". You can rename the drive to something meaningful to you in the space below the drop down. Then just hit the "Erase" button and you are good to go. No driver is needed!

Thanks XJ

Thanks for your help! I had gotten to that point, but wasn't sure whether to go with extended or the extended journaled. This drive is just for music. Is journaling necessary? Does it slow the drive down? What about taking up more room on the drive?

One last thing-when I place a question, how is the best way to find responses to it? I had to go through each question until I found mine...anyway, thanks for your help.

Failure in reformatting Seagate to extended journal

Okay-I went through the steps of going to disc utility > selected my drive > chose as my volume format: Mac OS extended journaled, renamed the drive> then selected erase. My drive now does not appear on the desk top, and I got the message:
DISK ERASE FAILED
DISK ERASED FAILED WITH ERROR:
FILE SYSTEM FORMATTER FAILED.

What does this mean?

Very odd. It worked fine for me. Below is a link to an article on the Seagate website which runs through the steps on formatting the drive. It appears they want you to use the "Partition" tab instead of the "Erase" tab - my bad. I know better than that and cranked out an answer too quickly. Give it a try and let us know if it works.

How to format your FreeAgent drive in Mac OS 10.5+

Wayne1957 said:

Thanks for your help! I had gotten to that point, but wasn't sure whether to go with extended or the extended journaled. This drive is just for music. Is journaling necessary? Does it slow the drive down? What about taking up more room on the drive?

Click to expand...

Extended it the current "Standard" for Mac OS X. It may or may not run faster, but certainly doesn't run more slowly than without journaling. It's designed to prevent corruption and make things a bit more fault tolerant. It basically keeps a "journal" of what's going on which can help fix problems if they occur.

Wayne1957 said:

One last thing-when I place a question, how is the best way to find responses to it? I had to go through each question until I found mine...anyway, thanks for your help.

Click to expand...

If you go to your User Control Panel on the left side and look at the options, a little way down is "Settings and Option" and within that "Edit Options". Clicking that opens a settings page and the second section from the top called "Messaging & Notifications" has a portion labeled "Default Thread Subscription Mode". You can choose to to have it automatically subscribe to a thread you start or post in and how you wish it to notify you of new replies.

getting no where

I really appreciate your help XJ. I went to the seagate page and followed the instructions-up to the part where it says to CHOOSE THE PARTITION TAB IN THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE DISK UTILITY WINDOW...I do not see any options to partition the drive. I am running v10.5.8. Am I missing something?

On the left side, make sure you have the top-most icon for the external disc selected ie: there should be a drive icon, and immediately underneath it there should be another icon for that drive that is slightly indented.

When you select the top most of the pair of icons you will have 5 options along the top of the Disk Utility window:
First Aid/Erase/Partition/RAID/Restore

When you select the bottom of the pair of icons you will have only 4 options:
First Aid/Erase/RAID/Restore

Toggle between the two icons for your external disk and you will notice the the options along the top changing...

I just went through all this with this same disk with Seagate's Tech Support a few minutes ago. He had me choose 2 partitions first, then go back and choose 1 partition. He also recommended OSX Journaled.

I'm not sure I'm going to keep this disk. I don't like the fact that the files can only be read by Mac. NOT that I expect to switch back to windows, but what good are backed up files if they can't be seen by Windows (JIC)?!?

I have also read some reviews that say that the files can't even be dragged from Seagate onto desktop. And you can forget sharing, according to them, because it works only with one computer.

Am I wrong about any of this? Is there a better externall HDD out there???????

eta: the Tech Support guy first had me choose 2 partitions "GIUD format", then immediately choose 1 partition "Apple format". I don't know why, just thought I'd mention it.

Arielluria said:

I just went through all this with this same disk with Seagate's Tech Support a few minutes ago. He had me choose 2 partitions first, then go back and choose 1 partition. He also recommended OSX Journaled.

Click to expand...

OS X Extended Journaled is the current standard.

Arielluria said:

I'm not sure I'm going to keep this disk. I don't like the fact that the files can only be read by Mac. NOT that I expect to switch back to windows, but what good are backed up files if they can't be seen by Windows (JIC)?!?

Click to expand...

Not sure what to tell you. Take it back if you don't like it. Files saved on to a Mac file system (HFS+) can be read by Mac, Windows and Linux. The file system can only be written to by Mac. There are paid and free applications which allow Windows and Linux to do so.

Arielluria said:

I have also read some reviews that say that the files can't even be dragged from Seagate onto desktop. And you can forget sharing, according to them, because it works only with one computer.

Click to expand...

Both my Macs and my Windows boxes can drag and drop to and from the Seagate drive. To share the drive you need to go into "System Preferences" > "Sharing" then select "File Sharing" and click the "Options" button. Once there select the check box that says "Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)"

Arielluria said:

Am I wrong about any of this? Is there a better externall HDD out there???????

eta: the Tech Support guy first had me choose 2 partitions "GIUD format", then immediately choose 1 partition "Apple format". I don't know why, just thought I'd mention it.

Click to expand...

I'm sure there are plenty of better drives out there. Perhaps check Other World Computing for Mac-specific options. I suppose you can get whatever you want if you have enough money.

I'm a bit late to the discussion but..... formatting as HFS doesn't really address sharing with Windows users does it?

Why not use the Paragon driver and format to NTFS?

If you just want to use them purely for Mac then you can use the setup dmg that came on the drive (or off the seagate website) to format the drive as HFS.

As far as alternative drives go..... you could have gone for the Seagate GoFlex for mac range (which has firewire 800 aswell as USB) but personally I prefer to buy hard disk enclosures and bare hard drives to go in them. That way you don't have to fight with all the bespoke software the HDD manufacturers seem to thing people want but most often don't.

WE have got one of these GoFlex Home drives at work. I cannot reformat the thing since no matter what I attach it to (with the USB cable), it isn't recorgnised.

I have tries Mac OS 10.6, Windows XP SP2 and Windows 7, none of them can see the drive.

It shows up when connected to the router, but no Macs can write to it, and the Paragon drivers are a no go since they will not install unless the drive is attached.

I am not asking for a solution, just saying I have had no luck with this drive and me and the boss are now ready to take it back, since quite frankly - it's eaten up enough of our time already.

PS - have tried another cable - but no go

Guess I got luck. My 1TB GoFlex has been fine since I bought it.

XJ-linux said:

Guess I got luck. My 1TB GoFlex has been fine since I bought it.

Click to expand...

I am looking at the Iomega networked drive

I wanted this product to work, but have run out of time

Found a fix on my MPB

I was having the same error as everyone else.

What solved it was plugging it directly into one of the USB ports on the MPB (not the keyboard or a USB hub). When it was plugged into either the keyboard USB port or plugged into my USB hub, it failed.

When I plugged it directly into one of the USB ports on my MBP, it worked great.