GoFlex, GoFlex Desk, GoFlex Pro, GoFlex Slim, & GoFlex Turbo

[fraleydl]

I need to use my GoFlex Desk 1TB for Windows XP and Mac (leopard). Both systems are on a Macbook Pro and meet all the requirements for this drive. After purchasing my drive and plugging it in for the first time, I accidentally set it up to work with Time Machine. So I need to reformat my drive so it will work with both Windows and Mac. Sounds easy, right? Using this page:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition

I understand all of the instructions and how to re-format a drive. The problem is that I cannot perform any of the operations I need to. The drive shows up in the disk management box as a blank option that has 933 GB of free space, but when I go to right-click to reformat, all of the options are grayed out and unclickable. Therefore I can't do anything to it. I have checked that I am the administrator, I scanned the drive and windows says it is "healthy" and "online". The drive has no files on it, I have rebooted the computer countless times in both windows and mac. I am not a beginner with using computers and software, but I seem to be the only one with this problem so far. I have been searching Microsoft, Seagate, and third-party forums for over 4 hours and have not found anything relevant. Perhaps its just a problem with the drive itself? I have also installed the Paragon NTFS driver on my Mac, it seems to be working, but not helping with the reformatting problem. Also, my drive did not have any of the "included software" on it. Anyway, any help getting my drive to work on PC and Mac would be appreciated. Thanks

*Not to be rude, but after searching this entire forum for any sort of solution, it seems that most people's problems would have never ocurred if some sort of detailed user manual or set-up guide was included in the box with the drive. I know it would have definitely helped me and probably prevented the simple mistake I made, saving a lot of time and frustration. If the "included software" on the drive was on a CD instead, I think that would also eliminate confusion with install procedures that people seem to be having. I'm sure that tech support people don't really have a huge say in what goes in with the packaging, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Not that it's your fault or anything! I am a big fan of tech support people, I appreciate the work and time that goes into helping people with their computer problems

[capricornx]

I have the same problem with my GoFlex Drive! please help!

[rkowens1]

Im having the same problem as well

[fraleydl]

Hi everyone I figured out a way to get around/solve this problem.

In the mac side, go to finder - utilities - disk utility - on the left column click on the drive (do not click on the time machine format below the actual drive itself) - go to the top options on the screen (first aid, erase partition, RAID restore) click on erase - under the drop-down of volume format select MS-DOS (FAT) - then click erase on the bottom right of the screen

I did this, and it re-formatted my drive and took time machine off of it. Now I can drag and drop files from both my Mac and Windows into the drive and they are readable by both systems. I am basically only going to use the drive as a giant USB storage device and not as an automatic backup device. If you want to use it for that it probably requires some other things, I'm not really sure, but otherwise it solves the problem of being unable to re-format the drive in Windows.

Hope this helps!

[JontyRP]

Hi Fraleydl,

Great you managed to figure out a solution for your problem. I would though advise an extra step, after having deleted the Time Machine partition in the Mac OSX Disk Utility I would have then gone back into Windows and then used the Windows Disk Management Utility (in the Computer Manager App) to create a new partion and format it with the NTFS file system. This has some definite advantages over the FAT (or FAT32) file system (which is what the Mac OSX Disk Utility will have used), not least being that it is far more efficient (space wise) with large partitions, such as the 1Tb partition of your GoFlex Desk drive. Also the FAT32 file system is limited in the size of single files, you can not have any single file larger than 4Gb, so if you wish to keep, or transfer, say DVD Disk Images or other large files the FAT32 file system won't allow you to do so. The NTFS file system is also far more robust and stable than the older FAT32 File System. Since you mentioned that you have the Paragon software installed for accessing NTFS file systems from within Mac OSX, you won't have any problem both reading and writing to the NTFS formatted partition.

The reason you were having problems with the drive in Windows, after having accidentally allowed Time Machine to use the drive is that Time Machine will have automatically reformatted the drive in the Mac OSX HFS+ file system which isn't recognised by Windows. Hence the problems you were having with Windows not recognising the partition and not allowing you to re-format it. That is why you had to do the initial delete of the partition from within Mac OSX. When Time Machine did this it would have destroyed / deleted any files that were on the original NTFS partition, including the software included with the drive. Hence not now being able to find that software.

I would agree that Seagate should either include the software on a CD-ROM in the box, or make it easily availabe via their website.

Jonathan

[capricornx]

I reformatted the drive following everyone's instructions, which worked, and I got an agent to give me the GoFlex_BundleSW which had all the lost software on it. I am trying to use my drive as a backup. However, after installing Mac Install.dmg, nothing happened and I don't know how I can back up my files on my Mac through GoFlex. Help?

[c0lorme]

Hi! I just wanted to say thank you sooo so much for posting this. You knew exactly what you were talking about and helped me solve my issue on this. Thank you again! I created an account just to be able to tell you thanks! =D