Hard drives in Seagate's FreeAgent line -- except for the Go Pro for Mac and the Go for Mac -- ship with NTFS, a file system designed for Windows. Formatting a drive will erase all its contents, so back up the drive first if you've already copied files to it on another computer. How to format a hard drive so it can be read on both a mac and pc. How to Set Up External Hard Drive for Mac and PC, Time Machine Backup and File Storage - Duration: 12:47.

You will need to reformat the seagate drive if it has not been formatted for mac.to do this. Connect your seagate drive to the mac.go to spotlight the magify glass at the top right corner and type in disk utility and select disk utility in disk utility make sure you select the seagate hard drive and choose erase. At the middle of the screen look for format and choose mac os extended.

You should now be able to write files to your seagate drive. Also if you would like be able to transfer files to and from a mac or PC then you will need to format the drive as FAT. Posted on Feb 16, 2012. • 65 Answers SOURCE: 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. 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. Change finder icon mac. Then go to your mac and you should be able to format it as a regular Mac drive. 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.

Sorry im new to all these technical terms. Im having the same problem. Just bought a 320gb external to use between my mac at home and pc's at work. I formatted it to my mac (without realising that only may mac would be able to read it - as i said im a layman in terms of computers and the it world!!) and when i plug into my pc at work there is no recognition of it in My Computer. Cold turkey dvd.

It recognises it in Safely Remove Hardware. I have a Mac OS X 10.6.3.

I cant seem t remove partitions in XP.all grey in drop down boxes etc should i try re-formatting on mac first??