Recently, a client came to us with a hard drive which they couldn’t get to function properly.  The product was the seagate goflex desk external drive that they had purchased from Costco a few months prior.  The hard drive had functioned properly, but it was formatted originally under NTFS file system and they were really trying to reformat the drive under Mac’s OS Extended format. But many different attempts weren’t allowing this to occur.  They could only get a fat32 format running and this severely limited the value of the hard drive. Not only that, the file system was now completely erased and they had no way of at least getting back the NTFS file system they had previously had working correctly.

Research into this issue showed others had gone through this same type of hard drive difficulty with the seagate goflex hard drive.

• Serious issue with FreeAgent GoFlex 2TB… (on Mac OS)
• Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex – constant “com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient”

After reading through these threads, we concluded that the seagate goflex desk external drive does not function well with the Mac’s Disk Utility that runs on OS Panther, Leopard, or Snow Leopard.  We are not sure about the Lion OS.  In order to properly format the drive entirely to function with a Mac OS Extended format, we had to start the Apple OS from our installation disc and use the disk utility function within that startup.  For some reason, that disc utility correctly formatted the hard drive where the dick utility version on our Loepard OS was not able to do so.  We are not certain if this is a Seagate issue or a Mac Disk Utility issue.  Nevertheless, the hard drive was formatted correctly for Mac OS Extended and client is happily using the entire drive under this format.

Never take for granted the value of backing up your content.  Get a nice size external hard drive that is trustworthy and make sure to have a good back-up routine setup.  Recovering lost information from a failed hard drive is painful!  While there are many advanced ways to recover “lost” information from a hard drive, proper hard drive recovery tactics are the best solution for ensuring all necessary documents, photos, and videos do not bite the dust forever.

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