I have a Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive (1.5T) that I used with a Windows computer for a while. I have been using a Mac more predominantly recently though. Since I got a new camera (Nikon D3100) recently, I have been taking a lot of pictures and filling up my Mac’s disk. Deciding I should offload 20 or 30 gigs of photos onto an external drive, I plugged in my Seagate to my Mac. I seemed to only have read access though and had no way of creating folders or transferring photos. This was going to be a problem.
I did a little searching and found a number of forum posts related to this issue. People had this exact drive and wanted to use it with a Mac, but couldn’t. Why should the OS matter, it is just a disk drive connected through USB (there is a reason the U stands for universal). I don’t know the details of why this doesn’t work, but I do know how to setup the drive to work with a Mac.
The Solution.
- Plug the drive into your Mac
- Open up Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)
- Select the external drive from the list of drives on the left
- Select the partition option
- Change the volume scheme from current to 1 partition
- Name the partition
- Make sure Mac OS Extended (journaled) is selected
- Click Apply (this will format the disk)
- The disk will now be ready to use with a Mac
Note: If you already have files on the drive, you are going to want to back them up because the above prescribes for formatting the drive.
Josh Branchaud 