FreeAgent Products

[andyg1987]

I received the Freeagent Desktop 250Gb model for Christmas, and unfortunately have had nothing but trouble with it.
I'm not entirely sure why, either. I use a MacBook Pro running Leopard 10.5.3 and want to use the FreeAgent as a Time Machine backup drive. I already use a Seagate 320Gb external harddrive as a drive for music/films etc, so I wanted to use the other as a backup.
However I am continuously having errors with the drive- it won't mount or be recognised by Disk Utility, and after fiddling with it I have to completely reformat. In addition to this, when I successfully mount the drive, and start the Time Machine Backup, it NEVER completes it. There is always some kind of error (Cannot find backup volume, error writing etc etc), and the drive will not unmount, causing shutdown to be impossible, and that means I have to force-shut down, which in turn means I have to reformat the FreeAgent and start the process again. Is there a solution to this? I've looked elsewhere, and a solution appears to be to unplug the light in the drive/attach a heat sink/take the drive out and use a different casing, none of which I wish to do as it voids my warranty and being a student on a tight budget, I cannot afford to buy a new one.
I've visited Apple to verify this problem and they have concluded after two clean installs that it is the Seagate hard drive and not Apple's hardware or software.
Any ideas.

[JanJanssen]

Have you tried it connected via Firewire?  Or via USB?

Tried formatting a small partition of like 30 GB just to see what happens?

What kind of formatting are you trying to give it?  Try Extended and Extended Journaled just to see what happens.

[andyg1987]

I've used USB only as this is the only connector that came with it. I've only formatted it with HFS+ Journaled so far, I'll certainly try it with different options, and also with more then one partition to see if that helps.
Is it something to do with the Power options as looking over the net I noticed a big furore surrounding the power options of the drive, and not being able to manage them on Mac OSX. When it powers back up it apparently appears as USB 1. Really not sure what's going on, but this problem is REALLY frustrating me.

[andyg1987]

Ok, the only thing in your list I've not been able to do is try it with a firewire connection. Other then that, I've tried everything else and it just hasn't worked, I'm still getting the same problem- not showing up on Disk Utility or Drive Manager. That goes for windows XP as well, no joy there (it's got MacDrive installed so it should be able to see HFS volumes).

Any ideas? I'm getting increasingly frustrated with not being able to use this drive.

[redsox15]

Hello,

I am having the same problems with my 500GB and here is what I have tried:

1. connected via SATA cable (opened case to connect directly) - nothing

2. changed USB/power cords - nothing

3. reformatted once, it mounted, worked and stopped again

It isn't recognized in disk utility, on my MacBook Pro or my husband's PC.

Any other suggestions? I have 95% of it backed up but I would feel better if I could check it again before returning to Seagate for a replacement. They won't pull data off for us and once you send it in, all data is lost.

Thanks in advance,

Meg