Can you set up a Seagate Freeagent Go external harddrive on a mac and windows simultaneously?
Q. I recently purchased a Seagate Freeagent Go and i set it up on my mac. While doing this i had to clear files off the external harddrive in order to format it. I want to use the freeagent go on my pc which runs windows and I’m having trouble reformatting it. Can anyone tell me how to set it back up on windows? and can I use the harddrive on both computers at once?
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partition a small (maybe 100kb) as your first partition and a pretty good size portion for windows. install windows then install mac (letting the installer automatically partition the rest of the drive) and use the mac boot loader on the small partition (windows boot loader will not recognize or be able to boot your computer into a unix based OS)
If you haven’t gone so far as to save a ton of files on the drive, just connect it to the Mac, open Disk Utility and erase using MS-DOS format. That will make it FAT32 format which works for both Mac and Windows. You may have options to change the format to FAT32 from the Windows computer without loosing data but I won’t go there.
One cable from the drive, it can connect to one computer at a time. You can share the drive on a local area network (ethernet cables and a router or hub) using SharePoints software. You could also share it by using UNIX command line application called Terminal that is in Applications > Utilities but Terminal is very geeky and will allow you to make any number of mistakes if you are not careful. Read details in the forum link below.
Notice that some of the forum comments suggest format Mac Extended. That’s what you have now, I suspect, and it is only useful on an all-Mac network. FAT32 format is the way to go.