FreeAgent Products

[bydnar]

New external FreeAgent Go 250 USB.  Plugged in to iMac and it was immediately detected, made 2 partitions, one for Mac, the other FAT32 for XP, Time Machine started automatically.  Had the two icons on the desktop, lights on the external drive on.  Life's wonderful.  Did a Time Machine backup and finished.  Went on to do other things, got distracted, iMac went to sleep and that's the last time the FreeAgent has worked.  Have tried all kinds of remedies, including the common ones at the top of the forum.  I've loaded software up the wazoo such as Seagate diagnostics and drive manager.  Neither can do anything because none of them recognize the drive and claim it non-detected.  I've plugged it in to my trusty XP machine and it does not detect it either.  If I listen real close I can hear something, but no lights, no detect, no nothin', no happy.  It sounds like it went to sleep ( Rip VanWinkle) with the Mac.  How do I wake it up if it is undetected by any means?

[ravakk]

Wait, you didn't set the FreeAgent drive as the target of Time Machine did you?

Heh I could almost swear by your conditions you put a File Allocation Table on the drive you gave Time Machine "locking" rights to.

If you did, repartition the entire drive as HFS extended non journaled (no osx 9 drivers) 

You say you are loading all kinds of software and diagnostics.....please say you are not loading this into osx. Not that it is any of my business heh

Does the drive show up in "Disk Utility.app" ? ( /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app ) 

If not, you say the iMac went to sleep, when you woke it up, was the drive icon just.....gone.....? Or did you have a situation that required a forced shutdown?

[bydnar]

FreeAgent as the target for Time Machine?  Not that I'm aware of 
 
I do not know what a file allocation table is, nor do I recall any prompt for such a thing

 
The FreeAgent drive is not available to ANYTHING...no icon on desktop, not showing in finder, not showing in time machine, not showing in disk utilities.
Therefore cannot reformat, which I'd love to do.
 
There was no forced shutdown involved.  A simple timer to go to sleep. 

When the drive is held to my ear, I can here it humming, as though it is spinning quite nicely. 

Thanks for your support, please continue 

[ravakk]

Is this that model FreeAgent that does not use a wall adapter for power? But instead has a usb cable with two connectors on one end and a single usb mini on the other end?

[bydnar]

This is the model that does not incorporate a 110v adapter.  It only uses a single USB plug.

UPDATE>>>>> Have spent an hour on the chat line today and have determined a bad drive.  Has been returned to retailer for exchange.

thanks for reading and offering 

[ravakk]

Let me know if the replacement does the same thing, we'll need to drop to command line and look at some things.

[bydnar · Accepted solution]

<<<<<<UPDATE FROM THREAD ORIGINATOR>>>>>>>

Purchased 250gb FreeAgent Go.  Being the cheap skate I am, I bought the PC formatted version, but originally thought I could use it for both Mac and PC.  I have an iMac on 10.5.6 and a PC w/Windows XP home. 

First drive attempt...

Partitioned into 2 unequal partitions.

Based on some faulty forum threads I was lead to believe I could format one partition in HPS+ and the other in FAT32.  Sounds great!  Backup each computer with one hard drive.  In retrospect, I think this totally corrupted the external drive to a point of it not being recognized by either system.

2nd attempt...on a new drive

Exact same external drive model, originally formatted for PC

Copied existing files on FA Go to a folder on the Mac, just in case I wanted them in the future. 

Used Mac disk utilities to reformat in HPS+, which wipes everything clean

Used Time Machine to backup entire Mac HD

Thus far have started, stopped, slept, plugged and unplugged external drive without failure.

From the first attempt failure, I noticed the issues after the Mac went to sleep.  I originally thought this to be the culprit.  From more searches and research, I learned about the energy saver in system preferences and have UNchecked the box to put the hard disk(s) to sleep, just in case. 

Learnings from this experience... 

Do not allow hard disk to be put to sleep. (still a questionable result)

Do not think you can be cheap and have one external drive to cover the 2 non-communicative operating systems.  Get one for Mac, and one for the PC.

Buying the cheaper drive for PC and reformatting to HPS+ is an alternative.  All that is lost is a few minutes to reformat and the FireWire connection.

I hope this helps someone else.