Backup Plus and Seagate Slim

[jmskennedy]

I'd like to use this drive for transferring files between a mac & PC.

I plugged my new backup plus for mac into my macbook and was never prompted to use timemachine or asked if I wanted to use the drive on PC or Mac or both.  The drive does not come up when I plug it into a PC either.  I have looked through the forums here trying to find out how to get it to work on both.  I looked at a thread that recommended formatting the drive through windows but have no options to reformat it through there.  I can see it in the disc management tool but the option to format & partition is grayed out.

I tried to format & reinstall the files that came with it through mac but it didn't help.

Any suggestions?

[silence711]

Install this to the PC: 

http://www.seagate.com/sg/en/support/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/goflex-desk-for-mac/go...

I know it says for GoFlex but it should still work.

A Mac formatted drive will not be accessible on Windows. It will show in device manager and disk management but you need to have the driver installed to "teach" your Windows machine how to read and write to a mac formatted drive.

Let me know if you have any other problems.

[jmskennedy]

Thanks for the reply.  I tried that and it works but it defeats the whole purpose of me getting this drive which is to be able to plug it into any PC and share the files.  We don't have privileges to install software on our work computers.

Does the drive just not work like this?  I don't want to have to install software on each computer that I plug it into to use....

If that's not possible with these drives I feel like Seagate is horribly misrepresenting their products.

Is there any way to set this drive up so that I can plug it into any mac or PC without installing extra software on those computers in order to use it?

[kenji57]

You could format it with FAT32 filesystem.

Note that you have to re-partition it to create the MBR to make it readable in windows  http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/helpdesk/the-right-way-to-format-windows-disks-using-a-mac/627

[jmskennedy · Accepted solution]

That worked perfectly! Thanks!

[aero789]

I created two partitions one for the Mac, using HFC+, and one for Windows, using FAT32, and selected Master Boot Record.  The Mac partition works fine with the mac.  When I restart my macbook pro in Windows, I can read and write to the Windows partition, but Seagate Manager won't backup to the partition.  The drive show up as one drive, with two letters, in Seagate Manager and the backup function is not available because it says I have no NTFS partition.  Sugestions?

[AlanM]

I'm sorry, Seagate Manager?  

Could you please clarify?