Seagte BackupPlus can't format

[BarkingGhostar]

Seagate Backup+ External USB3 drive. Originally installed in October 2013 under Mountain Lion hackintosh. I allowed OS X to create two partitions, one GUID with Mac OS Extended Journaled and one NTSF with MBR. I then setup Time Machine for OS X backups and it worked.

I run OS X on one Samsung SSD and Windows 7 Pro on another Samsung SSD. I then rebooted into W7 and verified the second partition was NTFS and ran a W7 backup. It worked once, and then any additional attempts complained about some system services not working. This is a know error not attributable to the storage device.

Since then I went back into OS X, upgraded to Mavericks and everything seemed kosher. I failed to test TM until two days ago and it failed. I removed the Seagate disk from TM and turned TM off. I went into Disk Utilities and tried to delete the partitions, recreate them and format them like I did in October. All failures.

While I could create partitions of either GUID/MBR type, the filesystem that was allowed was FAT only. I rebooted into W7 and tried to reformat the partitions to NTFS and that failed. BTW, W7 reconized the partitions as being FAT32. I then pulled the drive and put it into a box running Linux Mint 16 and while it could delete the partitions it could NOT create any with an applied filesystem type.

As far as I can tell, this Seagate Backup+ drive is only seen as a USB flash drive of very limited ability. With it formatted as FAT/32 I can store files on it, but it is worthless to OS X and of limited use in W7/Linux. Anyone got any ideas? Seagate seems to be aloof in providing tools to return the product back to a factory state.*

* At least WDC does provide tools to restore a product back to factory state. I will now now buy anymore Seagate products.

 

[MoInSTL]

I know nothing about Macs. Don't even know what TM is. I did find some stuff below that may help get you started.


Q: What is the cross-platform Paragon driver? Does it work with Apple Time Machine®?
A: Each Backup Plus product supports two scenarios for use with a Mac. When you connect a Backup Plus drive to a Mac, you will be presented with a utility to configure the drive for use.

There are two scenarios in which Backup Plus drives are supported for use with a Mac.
If you want to use your Backup Plus drive solely with a Mac, the utility will reformat the drive into the HFS+ format, which allows you to use the drive with Time Machine software included in the Mac OS.
If you would like to be able to “shuttle data” back and forth between a Mac and a PC, a special driver (included with the Backup Plus drive) needs to be installed onto the Mac that allows it to access a Windows-formatted drive (i.e. NTFS). Time Machine will not work in this case.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/004442en/?language=en_US

NTFS Driver for Mac OS
The NTFS Driver (5MB) allows you to mount the NTFS partition on supported Seagate drives as read and write (NTFS would normally be read only in MacOS), so the drive can be used to drag and drop files between a computer running Mac OS and one running Windows.
http://www.seagate.com/support/exte...backup-plus/ntfs-driver-for-mac-os-master-dl/

Using the drive under MacOS and Windows
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/214531en?popup=true

Found this forum post and while it is old and using Win XP, it may give you some ideas. http://forums.seagate.com/t5/GoFlex...th-Mac-Time-Machine-and-PC-Mac/m-p/74681#M853

Edit: Windows 7: Convert FAT or FAT32 Volume to NTFS (don't know if this will work with USB drive)
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11106-convert-fat-fat32-volume-ntfs.html

 

[BarkingGhostar]

You know, when I was unable to get anywhere in OS X and went into W7's Disk Management, I did notice the Seagate Backup+ drive has a 200MB EFI partition. I couldn't understand why it existed, but something tells me Seagate put it there.

This means when I removed it in Linux Mint it effectively created my problem. Still, unlike WDC external drives, Seagate makes no means to restore the drive to factory condition. I guess that is their business model (buy another).

BTW, I understand the aspect of converting via command prompt, but how is this different from attempting to do just this from Disk Management? I suspect the inability to convert to NTFS is how the OS sees the device.

 

[MoInSTL]

BTW, I understand the aspect of converting via command prompt, but how is this different from attempting to do just this from Disk Management? I suspect the inability to convert to NTFS is how the OS sees the device.

Will Disk Management allow you to delete the partition? If so, you can then reformat it to NTFS.

DiskPart may see the drive differently was my thinking behind that suggestion, especially booting straight to a command prompt. DiskPart can do more than Disk Management can.

To delete the EFI partition, you need to use Diskpart.
How to delete a protected EFI disk partition with Windows 7
http://www.winability.com/delete-protected-efi-disk-partition/


EDIT: FWIW, over the long weekend I finally had time to install the 2.50" HD that came with my laptop which had Win8 on it. It had at least 1 EFI partition and 3 other ones I can't recall. The easiest way was to blow away the drive in Diskpart which also blew away all of the partitions at the same time. Then I went back into Diskpart, made 1 large partition and formatted it. Took about 5 minutes.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I'll give this another try. When the external drive was formatted FAT I was able to delete the partition in Disk Management, but then the disk wasn't recognized, or it would show up as RAW (something new to me). I'll give Diskpart another try.