Seagate External Hard Drive

[timkins]

I have a Seagate external hard drive from my Windows days. I tried hooking to my Mac but it does not show on the screen as being recognized. I would like to use it to store my home movies and maybe edit them in the future. I am running a Mac with 3.1 GHz quad core Intel i5 with 4MB L3 cache, using the Sierra OS. I just found the original installation disc for the Seagate.

 

[IWT]

Hi

I'm afraid there are going to be more questions than answers for you at this stage.

Firstly, just how long is it since you last used this Drive, presumably on a Windows machine? It may simply have died.

When you attach it to your Mac, can you feel it spinning?

When attached, is it recognised in Disk Utility? And if so, how is the Drive formatted?

Even if the Drive is viable, this last question is important because you may be able to read from it, but to write to it as you propose will require additional software.

I'm sure we can help you sort things but some answers from you are needed to take things forward.

Ian

 

[pigoo3]

If this external drive is still functional...most likely it needs to be reformated for use with an Apple computer.

- Nick

 

[ferrarr]

Is there any data on the drive you need?

You can look in Finder > Preferences, under the General tab, select which items you want to show on your Desktop. Next, select Sidebar tab, look at Devices and select which items you want to show in the Finder sidebar.

If the drive was formatted NTFS, which is for Windows, you will be able to read the data and copy it to your Mac, if you need to save it. If you want to use the drive between macOS and Windows 10, you will want to format the drive as exFAT or FAT. The main difference between exFAT and FAT is that exFAT will support file sizes larger the 4GB and FAT will not. If you will not be sharing the drive between macOS and Windows, you can format it as Mac OS Extended Journaled.

 

[timkins]

The last time it was used was March of this year when I purchased my Mac. Yes I can hear and feel the hard drive spinning but could not find it anywhere on my Mac. I disconnected it as I do not want to mess anything up. I will reconnect this afternoon and check it in the disk utility area. Thanks for the responses.

 

[timkins]

Again thanks for the suggestions and help. I reconnected the Seagate HD and went to the disk utility and there was a message that my machine was unable to read the HD. Glad I asked before I messed something up.