Help with Locked Seagate Free Agent Pro:

[MDJAK]

Bought the 750 gb Free Agent Pro at Costco. Hooked it up via firewire 400 to my MacBook Pro. It came up on the desktop, but I cannot copy to it. It reports it is locked.

I can't seem to unstuff the software that comes with it either with stuffit version 12.

I control clicked to get info, but there's no "unlock" button.

HELP!!!


me

[minhi]

have you tried opening disk utility and reformatting the drive? i've seen this happen with files when you set it to read only in windows (mac can't reset the permissions)

[kobe629]

Yeah I think you would have to reformat it because by default I think it is formated NTFS and apple can't write to it. I would format it FAT32 so you can write to both platforms..

[MDJAK]

I do not see reformat as a choice under disk utilities.

me

[MDJAK]

and I never had this problem with my two maxtors or WD external drives.

me

[Tony-S]

I do not see reformat as a choice under disk utilities.

Seagate drives come preinitialized for Windows.

1. Launch Disk Utility and select the Free Agent drive in the left panel. Check the drive, not the partition (which is windows formatted and is indented under the Freeagent drive).

2. Click on the Partition pane of the main window. If the pull-down says "Current", change it to 1 Partition. The Options button should become active. If you have an Intel-based Mac, it's a good idea to click on this button and set the format to GUID. If you ever need to boot from this drive it must be GUID-formatted for an Intel-based Mac.

3. Back to the main pane; make sure Format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then initialize the drive. Should only take about 30 seconds and it's now read to read and write.

[CyberDyneSystems]

When you do this, you will lose the back up utility that comes with it (I don;t recall a CD with mine?)
And "Freeagent" doesn't run on Mac anyway..

But frankly, how many back utilities do you want installed,? If you already have and use the software that came with Maxtor or WD drives, just use that IMHO, or which ever you prefer.

[Laramie]

I purchased the same HD from Costco, but I'm running it on my PC. However, when I set mine up, I noticed a lot of preinstallled software and utilities on the HD itself and I would assume they were only Windows compatible.

I haven't tried plugging this into my Macbook Pro but I would try another way to reformat. Just my 2 cent...

[Tony-S]

When you do this, you will lose the back up utility that comes with it (I don;t recall a CD with mine?)

I don't think Seagate ships a Mac utility, but I do have the CD that came with it, presumably he did to?

[MDJAK]

I'm not sure if it came with a cd, but Tony, thank you. That did the trick.

And I don't use any backup utilities. Never saw a need for one.

Thanks again.

mark

[r.morales]

I always reformat a new / different drive . You don't know what is was on it and just opening a drive won't show hidden files - just like your CF cards for camera .
I have same drive and considering another .