Seagate Freeagent Goflex Format For Mac
There are two scenarios: Each scenario can be used separately.
I get this question a lot – I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted (Windows format), and I want to reformat it for my Mac (HFS). How do I do that? And you know what? It’s not nearly as easy as it should be! There is one trick to it that is not intuitive. So how DO you do it?
Seagate's new collection of GoFlex for Mac portable and desktop drives make it easy for people to backup, shuttle, or share their digital content between Mac and PC environments without reformatting. Hello, I am trying to understand how it is that a Seagate GoFlex Desk External Hard drive, purposely formatted for use on Mac's only in a work environment, has now been switched to a PC operating. Seagate sells GoFlex drives that fit snugly into the dock, but the connectors inside are standard SATA and I successfully connected several non-Seagate drives to the ports. Backup Plus and GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt Software for Mac The Seagate Thunderbolt adaptor driver is only needed if you are using 3 TB or 4 TB drives with the Thunderbolt adaptor and plan to change drives with other GoFlex adaptors (such as USB or FireWire).
First Plug the drive in to your Mac. Then open the Disk Utility that is located in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. You will see your internal drive in your Mac, as well as any other storage devices that are connected. For this exercise, it is best to DISCONNECT any and all external storage devices, so you only have the one that you wish to format connected. That way you will protect yourself from inadvertently re-formatting the wrong drive. You must still be careful in your selection of which drive to format, as you certainly don’t want to format one of your internal drives.
When you see the drives listed down the right hand side of the Disk Utilities window, you will see at least two entries for each physical hard drive. The first is the physical drive itself. What appear underneath the physical drive are the individual partitions.
Most drives are formatted into a single partition, so you will normally see only one entry underneath a physical drive entry. But that is not always the case, so don’t be surprised, or think there is something wrong, if you see more than one entry under a physical drive. For the purpose of reformatting, you need to start by selecting the PHYSICAL drive that you wish to reformat.
In my example here (shown in the pictures here), I will be reformatting the drive shown as ‘298.1 GB Seagate FreAge.’. You can see at the bottom of the first image that this drive is formatted as Windows NT File System (NTFS).
We want it to be Mac HFS formatted. Once you have selected the PHYSICAL drive, then click on the Partition tab at the top of the window. You will then need to click on the down arrow under the heading ‘Volume Scheme’ to indicate how many partitions you wish this newly formatted drive to have. Again, the standard is one, and that is what is shown here in the images. On a Mac, they system will automatically try to format any partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You will see this indicated on the right hand side of the image, labeled ‘Format’.