FreeAgent Products

[angelafrady]

I'm running Windows 7 and I have owned a Seagate FreeAgent 320 gig desktop external hd for a couple of years and had no problems with it. Today, I bought and installed a Seagate FreeAgent Go 888 gb portable hd. The Seagate Manager recognizes them both but whenever I go to My Computer, it will only show one or the other, not both at the same time. I have only 3 usb ports on my laptop, (2 on the right and 1 on the left) and I use one on the right side for my cordless mouse. I use a usb extension or adapter with 3 usb outlets on it. I've tried plugging them both into the adapter and it will only recognize 1 of them. It's not picky about which one it will recognize, but it is definitely only going to recognize one at a time. I've tried plugging one of them on the right hand side and the other on the left and it is still the same way. The Seagate manager will find them both, but not the computer. I noticed that in the Seagate manager, the one that the computer does not recognize will be listed under Partiitons as "unknown" and will have the correct name of the unit under the Model listing and under Free Space it will say "0",  while the other one will show up as FreeAgent Drive (G and will have full information including the correct amount of free space. I see that others on the messageboard have had this same or very similar problem but I don't see a solution that might work for me. Is it just that you cannot have 2 Seagate externals running on a computer at the same time? If so, I sure do hate to think I've wasted my money. I wanted to copy files from the 320 gig to the 888 gig to take on the go. This is very disappointing. 

Thank you! 

[angelafrady]

Chatted with Seagate this morning, trying to find a solution to my problem. They referred me to contact HP, the manufacturer of my laptop. Chatted with them online and found a very simple solution, so thought I would post it here for anyone else having this problem. This worked for me in Windows 7. Go to START, CONTROL PANEL, SYSTEM & MAINTENANCE, ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS, COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, then DISK MANAGEMENT. My 2nd external hard drive was not showing in the upper panel, but I saw both the older external HD and the new one listed in the bottom panel, and the new one said "offline" on the left hand side. I right clicked where it said "offline" and changed it to "online" and voila!! Both of the hard drives are now working at the same time and they have both been assigned different drive letters!! Hope this helps anyone else with the same problem!

[Bill V]

Thanks for the great tip!  That fixed the issue I was having!

[Danni-Stone]

Hi,

I've done as angelafrady suggested, and it was all going well until the disk manager says that I can't make my second HDD go online because, "this disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online". That means that both HDDs are trying to use the same letter path (H: ). I've tried changing the first one to a different letter, changing the second one to a different letter etc etc but nothing seems to work, they both keep using the same letter regardless of what I do!

Can someone please tell me what I should do to make both of my HDDs appear at the same time?

By the way I'm on an HP Pavilion dv8, windows 7 i7, and the drives I am trying to get to work are both 3TB freeagent goflex, if that makes any difference. 

[Cantbecanit]

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/FreeAgent-Products/Cant-Connect-2-FreeAgents-Hards-Drives-To-Computer-P...

[amt01]

That was good - fixed my problem - Thanks - though for some reason I couldn't find W7 disk Management

(Search for "computer management" in the start menu toolbar and open it - couldn't see that

- found device management - disk drives - but that didn't show the info required)

Eventually found this -

To open the Windows 7 disk manager do this:

1. Click on Start 2. Enter diskmgmt.msc into the search field