FreeAgent Products

[JSullivan]

I recently bought a new 1.5TB Seagate Desk (USB) to replace an identical unit which I dropped.

I used the new unit on my XP desktop, copied about 100GB of files, no problem.

Upon plugging it into my Sony VAIO laptop running Vista, Every time I click on the drive in Vista, it launches a Seagate Manager Installer.  I tried to skip this, but ther seemed to be no way around it, so I installed it.

Not Seagate Manager runs, but it apparently is set up for automating backups, and seems to have no way to let me simply copy a few folders and files onto the Seagate drive (which I'd really rather do in Vista anyway).

I've wasted a lot of time on this.  My prior Seagate drive, which I believe was the same model, did not hijack itself and block me out of using Vista to use it as a simple USB drive.

Is there a way around this problem, so I can set the Seagate drive to not interfere with my use of it as a USB drive within Windows Vista?

[RobinSwan]

I would like to know this as well.  Just bought a FreeAgent Go and it will only let me do backups of certain drives, and not even remote drives.  I have Window XP.  Tx.

[jhhorwitz]

I haven't tried this and I currently run Windows Vista (ugh! <grin>). However, the concept seems like it's worth a try.

You need to have Seagate Manager installed or the drive will think it's a new installation. However, I don't think you need to have it automatically start when you boot up your system. So, if that's true (and you'll need to try it, but it isn't difficult), you just need to switch Seagate Manager from starting at bootup to not starting at bootup.

I forget how to do that directly in Windows XP: In Windows Vista, you can manage startup programs in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, System Configuration, Startup tab, and just check or uncheck the box in the Startup Item column. For Vista, then, you should be able to just uncheck that box for "Seagate FreeAgent Application".

I searched for "Windows XP startup item management" and found "Startup Control Panel" at the following link:

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml 

This is a donationware product that looks like it could add the startup management feature to Windows XP's Control Panel (I don't remember using it, but I think I did have something installed to do that job back when I ran XP).

I hope this helps!

JERRY