Seagate 4th External Hard Drive

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Charise Scrivner

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Aug 5, 2024, 7:57:56 AM8/5/24

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Ive been using an external hard drive for my photography, and it's been working fine for the last 3 weeks, connecting reading/writing, everything the way a drive should work. Well, yesterday, it stopped connecting. I plug it into a windows computer and it shows up there, so it's not damaged. I haven't reformatted this drive in any way, it is still registered as exFAT so I can use it on both windows and Mac. But, it will not show up on my Mac. I have tried different cables, different USB-C hubs, USB-C to USB- A adapters, but as I said it is being recognized on a windows computer, so the cables are fine.

If you need to use an adapter with the drive to connect to your Mac, then are you also using this adapter on the Windows system? Even if you are, you may need to try another adapter and even a different cable.

Did you receive this drive new and was it already formatted as exFAT? It is usually best to use Disk Utility on macOS to erase the whole physical external drive as GUID partition and exFAT in order to minimize problems. Windows systems may format exFAT with file allocation sizes which are not compatible with macOS. Personally I always erase every brand new drive even if it ships from the factory with a file system I will end up using anyway because you never know what may be hidden on the drive or whether the factory file system is good.

If so, then try booting into Safe Mode to see whether macOS will see the drive. If Safe Mode works, then it most likely means you have some third party software installed which is interfering with the normal operation of macOS. Usual culprits are anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, and third party security software....none of which are needed on a Mac.

if you run the first aid it will only checks if there are any errors bugs on your external hard drive it will not erase your data . have you figured out the problem by now? I have similar problem as you my external hard drive was mounting ok afew days ago , it doestnt work any more on ventura 13.3.1 . I have tried mounting it on other Mac lapotps external hard drive works fine

"Seagate External Hard drive not being recognized anymore, not sure what to try next.: what worked for me at the end was I went to setting>>login item >>allow in the background >>disabled most of the softwares . Then rebooted my laptop and the external hard drive finally showed again

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive and recently it stopped mounting on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2012), currently running El Capitan Beta 5. It refuses to show up in Finder or Disk Utility, but the drive itself lights up like it is connected. I have another drive that I use for Time Machine, which shows up just fine.

It works, however, on Windows PCs and OS X Yosemite latest version. I plan to submit a bug on this but I thought I'd get some community help on this issue as well, to see if there is anything else I can do to make it work.

My solution: Since I had another Seagate drive that I needed to reformat anyways, I did a little research and found that the exFAT format works better for Mac/PC interop. As soon as the format was done on my Windows machine, I ran back to my Mac and plugged that drive in and -- what do you know -- it worked!!

For Future Reference: Advice to anyone who buys a Seagate NTFS-based ext. hard drive and plans to use it with a Mac, first thing before you put any data on it -- REFORMAT it to exFAT - it will save you a lot of trouble later.

This doesn't solve the issue that El Capitan, especially with the later betas, seems to refuse to show any NTFS drives anymore. This may be a bug, and I'll keep my issue open, but it's worth taking note that there's a better way to do file systems on ext. hard drives.

That's because the whole point of this issue is the drive was not recognized by the Mac OS X El Capitan in the first place. It's like it didn't exist from the system's point of view. Even in Disk Utility. So reformatting from Disk Utility didn't help. So, I turned to my Windows computer, which did recognize the existence of the drive, and reformatted it to exFAT. If you want easy interop between systems, exFAT is the way to go.

I have a 1tb Seagate external hard drive that I have had for a little while and it used to work fine, but my laptop is now not recognizing it when I plug it in. It has a usb and it has its own plug for power. I have not used it in a little while and wanted to transfer some files over (pictures, movies etc) and now my laptop is not recognizing it. I am not a laptop/ computer whiz so any help would be much appreciated.

Your problem is about not recognizing hard drive but i can't understand the exact problem. Could you please provide me the screenshot of your issue? After that i will understand what the problem exact is. For knowing how to take screenshot goto -to-take-screenshot-on-windows-8/

I have formated the hard drive as NTFS. I can see my movies files on the hard drive with my computer. I have also reset the WD media player. The WD live stream media player will not Recognised my drive. I might have to buy a WD drive so it is compabile with the media player. I have the 1tb seagate external drive and it works perfectly with the media player.

The fact that you formatted a drive (that came out of the box formatted and ready to use) makes me wonder why you did this and if you did the steps correctly. Also, you need to connect the drive to a PC and have Windows scan it for errors as previously mentioned.

I am having the same issue but with a 4tb Seagate Backup Plus. Brand new drive formated with NTFS, only has movie files on it. Brand new WD TV Live HD Streaming Media Player 1080P WDBHG70000NBK with Wifi, and updated to latest firmware.

I am struggling to mount my external hard drive. It shows up in "disks" but I am unable to access it. Reformatting is out of the question as the hard drive has years worth of photos so I am looking for an answer from you good people about how to access the drive. I have seen others posting about the same issue but haven't seen any answers that have worked for them. The "smart data test" option in "disks" is not available to click on to check the hard drive which was an option I saw someone else post. Any and all help is welcome. Thank you.

NTFS can be sometimes be fickle on linux.

We still dont know format of partition 1 containing your files though.

If you have Gparted (installed or on your Zorin bootable USB) use that to see if it tells you the formatting of that partition.

Well the content on the device is not backed up elsewhere so reformatting is not an option. I do have another identical drive which mounts fine so I am going to go through them both on "disks" to look for any differences.

Looking at my other seagate external hard drive which does mount with no issues, partition 1 on there also has an unknown format so clearly partition 1 having an unknown partition isn't the issue. I have just ran the "check filesystem" option in "disks" for the unmounted hard drive which states the drive "needs repairing" while the mounted one "is undamaged" so would you recommend I click "repair filesystem" or would that be a major risk of losing the content on the hard drive?

I have tried all 5 USB slots that I have and no joy sadly. It is Zorin 17 yes.

Well ZorinOS is completely installed on the computer, Windows is not an option for me at all. The odd thing is I can see the hard drive that won't mount and having gone through all the options in "disks" to compare the unmounted drive and the mounted drive they are identical, no clue at all why it won't load. I have contacted ZorinOS themselves who just redirected me here (good job I haven't paid for Pro).

I just bought a 6TB external seagate HDD (STKP6000400) to use for storing media, but I have noticed it is spinning at full speed, all the time. Even after leaving the PC idle overnight the next morning it is still spinning.

I just installed via the precompiled amd64.deb binary and configured /etc/default/hd-idle and set launch options to -i 0 -a sdb -i 600 to ensure it's only active for the drive I wanted (sdb). Running the commands systemctl start hd-idle and systemctl enable hd-idle seems to get the behaviour to work correctly and it persists after reboot.

I'm still not sure why I have to brute force it but this seems to be working as I wanted, the drive spins down after the configured time (I'm using the default 10 minutes) and it spins back up if something attempts to access the files on it.

I wanted to copy from one to the other while both were attached. They can't work together for some reasons. The one which was plugged first is shown (for example like: "J" drive) and the second is not shown at all but still visible from the Safely Remove and Eject MEdia tray, so I can eject them..

I just got my 2TB FreeAgent GOFlex Desk and plugged it into laptop. Formatted it works fine. Plugged my 500GB FreeAgent GO and NADA. Swapped just as you all did and nothing, both worked independently and would not work together.