Can I format the seagate plus drive to win & mac and is so how?

SOURCE: How do I format a Seagate 500 to work on a Mac?

I bought one of the Seagate FreeAgent 500 devices yesterday and followed the instructions on the back of the box: plug it in; let the Mac recognize it; go to the Disk Utility function (found in Applications > Utilities); select the Erase tab and check the box to re-format the FreeAgent to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and choose a name for it.  Then proceed with the re-formatting.  It took only a few minutes but as soon as it was done, Time Machine (Leopard) kicked in and asked if I wanted it as my backup drive.  I said yes, and away it went.  Hope this helps.  By NewbieMacUserSept2007

Posted on Dec 29, 2007

SOURCE: Seagate Free Agent Drive Cannot be Modified on Mac G5

First of all Hello John :)

The new seagate drive you got needs to be unpartitioned and its file format system needs to be deleted and changed.

NB: You will lose all your data so make sure that you copy everything useful off it before you do these steps.

1. Get hold of a windows PC and right click on my computer
2. Choose manage ... choose disk management right click on the drive and delete the partition type
3. delete again until it comes unpartitioned space
4. Then go to your mac and you should be able to format it as a regular Mac drive.
5. If the Windows PC is inaccessible. Get hold of a copy of Linux UBUNTU distro. Boot your MAC from CD choose to boot os from CD (don't worry it will install nothring on your MAC it will just use the CD but make sure you choose the right option)
6. Keep your hard drive attached so it gets detected during bootup. Once the UBUNTU OS boots choose GParted and from there do the same thing i explained above.

Hope that this was of help :)

Cheers
(please take some time to rate solution)

Posted on Jan 07, 2009

SOURCE: Trying to format for MAC

I had a similar issue and was able to work around it by partitioning the drive. See this site for information: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

Overview: Open Disk Utility, Click on the Drive, Click Partition, Choose the number of partitions, and click Apply.

(It's written for video editors, but is applicable in your situation)

Let me know if this helps!

Posted on Apr 19, 2009

SOURCE: I have Seagate - FreeAgent Go 500GB External USB

Open up the control panel with the drive connected, open administrative tools and computer management. Select storage and see if the drive is listed there. It will probably let you format it from there.

Posted on Oct 24, 2009

SOURCE: Mac Formatted Seagate Go 250GB Hard Drives are nearly $40 extra..

Yes, you can format a windows OS drive on your MAC to one of the MAC filing system, which would work just as good.

Posted on Jan 20, 2010