Seagate Freeagent External Hard Drive- How To Use With Mac And Pc?
Q. I have a seagate freeagent external hard drive and i’ve been using it with a PC. it’s been fine and dandy, but when I try to back up files from my macbook, it says that the freeagent can not be modified. i know this can be fixed by reformatting the hard drive, but that would delete everything already on it, right? i don’t want to do that. so is there any way that i can use it with both a mac and a pc without deleting everything?
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Well I work at best buy and along with routers, external drives are my favorite thing to sell to people. If I’m not mistaken, the freeagent drives require Windows to work so odds are they wouldn’t work with your Mac even if you did reformat. I won’t guarantee that though because some things say they shouldn’t work and they will anyway but I can say that I doubt there’s a way to make it work for both without reformatting because I’m pretty sure Windows and Mac use two different file compression types. I’m going to google this for a second and if I find something else to add I’ll edit. Hope this helps and sorry for the bad news!
Here we go!
Windows OS to Macintosh OS:
It is only possible to read FAT and FAT32 formatted drives in a Macintosh with OS 10.2 or earlier. Using a FAT32 formatted drive within the Macintosh environment is only recommended for a short period of time to transfer data.
Data corruption will very possibly occur when using FAT32 over an extended period of time in a Macintosh.
Also keep in mind, that you will have a 4 GB file transfer limitation. Do not use NTFS formatted drives.
Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later, works with local NTFS-formatted volumes. The volume will be read-only. You will be able to copy data from, but not to the external hard drive. With FAT32, it is recommended that the volume/partition size of the external hard drive not exceed 32 GBs. Data corruption will be prevalent when using FAT 32 over an extended period of time in a Macintosh.
NTFS formatted drives cannot be used in a Macintosh (except as read-only with Mac OS X 10.3 as noted above). If you attempt to use a NTFS formatted disk, upon starting up the Mac OS will prompt you to format the drive. Do not format the drive, doing so will erase the contents of the drive. If you have an NTFS formatted disk, you must use another method to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh.
Please also see the following Macintosh article:
How to transfer data from a PC to a Macintosh
I’ve included the article for you to check out if you want. Hope this helps!