Seagate XT 'disaster' redux

I have been trying to upgrade my MacBook Pro (15-inch late 2008) with a Seagate XT (1Tb) drive. There were no problems with installing a bootable copy of OS X and transferring the data while it was in an external enclosure. However I have not been able to get it to work once installed inside the MBP. The specifics vary slightly, but basically the drive usually crashes after 10-15 minutes. When I run Disk Utility, it says the drive is fine but notes lots of permission problems. When I try to fix them, the drive dismounts.
This problem seems to have been covered in the long-running "Seagate Momentus XT Disaster" thread. Can Csound1 (or other participants) tell me: were the problems which tomfromchicago and others were having likely because of the eSata cable connection to the internal hard drive? Should that be the next thing I try to fix? Apologies, but I found the original thread itself slightly difficult to follow....
Thanks (in advance),
Bill

tomfromchicago wrote:
OGELTHORPE wrote:
Does this particular HDD have a Sudden Motion Sensor built in? If so, it may be conflicting with the MBP SMS.
Have you contacted Seagate technical support on this issue?
Ciao.
Yes. They have never heard of this problem before and could not offer any solution.
I was suggested to try to do a fresh install of OS X onto this drive rather than a clone. Also, before that I am going to try to close with SuperDuper, instead of Carbon Copy Cloner.
It does not sound like the Momentus XT drive is compatible with Mac. A real shame as I can't get my money back and the drive so far is useless.
I have 2 MBP 13" (both mid 2009) both fitted with the 500G XT, I have a 2011 MBP 13" fitted with the 750G XT, and I have fitted one or the other XT to several other Macs and and PC's. I have never had a problem with any of them.
But I do my housekeeping which includes ensuring that the drives had the latest firmware (SD28 for a 500 and SM12 for a 750)
You did update your drive before complaining I assume?

Similar Messages

How much does it cost to replace the SATA cable in a 2009 13" MBP if Apple does it?

The laptop isn't under warranty, and the repair would occur in NYC.

The problem with having Apple do it is they will replace it with the same cable part number, the same cable as original.
If you are having problems with a faster drive not working you really need an updated cable. The part number for that cable can be found in the Seagate XT disaster thread on this forum.

Query w/ Seagate External Hard Drive

Hi, I recently bought a 1TB Seagate hard drive which I believed to be "plug 'n play" but that is apparently only awarded to Windows users.
The one I bought is... http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9752952/Seagate-Expansion-1TB-External-USB-2-0-Des ktop-Hard-Drive/Product.html
Can anybody advise on how to make this external hard drive compatible with my MBP? I presume I need to change the format, but my technical prowess does not extend to this sort of stuff. Any help is extremely appreciated!!

The problem is quite simple really, the drive was formatted as NTFS. Mac OS X only has read support for NTFS, no write. There are various programs to add NTFS write support, but unless you're planning to share this drive with a Windows system, a better solution is to fire up Disk Utility, delete the current partition, and create a new HFS+ partition.
One thing I would suggest however, is creating at least 2 partitions. One smaller one, about 10GB or so in size, and then the other with any remaining space. You then install an emergency backup copy of OS X onto that 10GB partition. Do whatever you please with the rest, though it couldn't hurt to create another partition of say 100GB for Time Machine if you don't already have something. This way, if your computer's internal drive should ever fail, you can still boot and use the system from that external drive. It's extremely useful for both disaster recovery and diagnostic purposes.

Disk Utility in Lion 10.7.4 for Bare Metal Disaster Recovery??

We just got our 15" Macbook Pro back from repair of a catastrophic hard disc failure. Wow. An older Seagate Momentus XT 500 toasted its little self. It seems most of our data are intact. If any software on the *new* hard disc get corrupted, we need a fairly straightforward disaster recovery process.
I need to ask if anyone has successfully used Disk Utility to create a (bare metal) disaster recovery image of everything on their hard drive, including all their software *and* the perfectly functioning OS. We'd like to be able to restore a complete disc image of the new Seagate Momentus 750 XT - taken from a 1 TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex USB drive - to the Macbook.
Has anyone done this successfully? Thanks very much for your help!

Time Machine, SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are some of the utilities that will allow you to backup your disk and do a complete restore.

Seagate 500 GB Drive

I have an interesting situation with Seagate 500 GB drive I recently installed in my Sawtooth G4. The drive is a Seagate 7200.10.
My computer recognizes the drive, and really, the drive works. However, If I connect an ultra 133 cable to it, my computer cannot download/convert a music CD from iTunes.....My computer crashes. My computer can read files from this drive, and save to it from applications like Word. iTunes will even playback songs that are downloaded to this drive. So everything works, my computer just won't download to this drive from iTunes.
Now here's what's weird. If I connect this drive to my computer via and old IDE cable, my computer will download to it from iTunes, and it works fine for every application I use. The old cable I am referring to is a 3M IDE cable that reads AWM 2651, VW-1, 105 C, 300 V, 28AWG.
The suspect Ultra Cable reads AWM 20276, VW-1, 80 C, 300 V, 30 AWG.
I connect large drives to the motherboard via a SIIG Ultra ATA controller.
So, can anyone give an explanation for this strange occurrance.
Thanks,
Ray

Hello Ray,
There are a couple of posts on the SIIG card. It may prefer Western Digital to Seagate drives, and it may prefer cable select to master/slave cabling. Mine worked initially when I used already an already formatted drive - I think an ATA-100 Seagate drive with the factory supplied 80 conductor ribbon, but I don't remember for sure. Might have been a mule. Disaster struck when I went to erase and install OSX (Tiger).
Not sure what the diference in cables would be; I think the 80 conductor ATA-100 cables simply supply a ground for each pin.
Hope I'm not leading you astray with a red herring; I still think it's the card, somehow. Don't know how you'd check it. I've used Acard and Sonnet controller cards - and also some awfully raggedy cables - with never a problem.
Regards ..... Jon

Using a seagate external drive with multiple macs

i got a 1TB seagate external hard drive for backup and transfer purposes... it had a little program to help set it up and i set it up for use with mac and pc ( only onther option was stricty this computer.) it works on my computer and a pc but when i tried transfering files from another older mac i have it showed that i could only read on that computer...
how can i get it to work with multiple macs...?

I have the oldest macbook (1.83. 2 gigs ram, 60 gig internal hard drive)
I have all my logic content on my external maxtor firewire 400 drive (usb 2.0 is actually faster than firewire 400) and everything is fine. the good thing is if your external drive has 7200rpm, but the ones with 5600rpm should do as well.
Once you drag your apple loops to logic from your external drive, logic will remember for the next visit. And when you are opening a project which is on the external drive , just find it with logic finder and all should be fine.

Seagate external drive not recognized

Seagate Back Up Plus external drive is no longer recognized by my Macbook Pro. There were no warnings or prompts just one day was no longer recognized by Finder, Disk Utility and Disc Warrior can't see it either. I can hear the whirring sound of it starting up when plugged in to my computer. Any ideas how to get it back?

Thanks kaz-k,
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            749.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            DiskWarriorDVD         *1.4 GB     disk1
192-168-1-2:~ Jessie$

I recently purchase macbook air with OS 10.10.2. I want to use my Seagate external backup plus hard drive for time machine back up. How to partition my 1TB Seagate back up plus hard drive for use with mac and windows pc?

Hi All,
I recently purchased 13" Macbook Air with OS 10.10.2. I want to use my 1TB Seagate backup plus external hard drive as time machine and my windows 7 pc. Please suggest a method. Thanks in advance for your reply.

I strongly recommend having an external drive dedicated solely for TimeMachine. You could partition the drive but if something goes wrong you risk losing the data on both partitions. Should you decide to go ahead with splitting the drive for two different uses you’ll need to partition the drive either using the Mac’s built in Disk Utility program or Windows utility. I believe the built in Windows disk utility program will destroy the current partition and erase the data that’s on it - I use a third party Windows disk utility program for partitioning and it allows for non-destructive partitioning but warns to back up data first just in case. Apple’s Disk Utility can do non-destructive partitions but I don’t recall every trying to do a non-destructive partition on a disk originally formatted for Windows using it. Again - back up that data just in case.
Finally, your TimeMachine drive should be at least 1.5 times (I prefer 2 times) the size of the data you expect to be backing up a year or two from now. In other words, if you currently are using 50GB of your computer’s drive but expect to begin purchasing Mac software to replace software on your Windows computer and if you expect to be putting photos, music, and other data on it you might expect that two years from now you’ll have 100GB of stuff on the drive. So a 200GB partition is the smallest size you’d want. TM’s backup scheme keeps multiple copies of data as it changes so the extra room is important for this scheme.

Seagate external hard drive -- should I format and partition?

Hi all,
Sorry, three weeks into owning my MacBook Pro, I'm still a newbie.
I got rid of PCs because they just kept grinding to a halt, and so I want to do everything EXACTLY right as I start out in Macworld.
I need to get an external drive for Time Machine and other back-ups. Is it generally accepted by you all that the drive should be formatted (to get rid of whatever Seagate puts on it) and then partitioned along the lines of Answer #5 in the Time Machine FAQ? Is that what most people do -- with good results?
Thank you.

MarkPek wrote:
I need to get an external drive for Time Machine and other back-ups. Is it generally accepted by you all that the drive should be formatted (to get rid of whatever Seagate puts on it) and then partitioned along the lines of Answer #5 in the Time Machine FAQ? Is that what most people do -- with good results?
If the Time Machine FAQ recommends something, I'd do it.
By the way, if you're going to use that drive for Time Machine and "other back-ups", I'd create separate partitions for each of those two uses.

Recently my keyboard on my macbook pro died. i backed up the machine to my Seagate 500GB hard drive, successfully, and sent the notebook in for repairs. Now that the macbook is repaired, i can read from the seagate, but not write to it. It says read only.

Recently my Macbook Pro's keyboard failed. Using my wireless keyboard, i managed to backup everything to my 500gb Seagate external hard drive. I sent the machine in, had the keyboard repaired, and now the machine is back, and i am loading my content back onto the macbook. My problem is that the drive is now read only, and i have searched for all the obvious fixes. The lock on the permissions secion of the info block on the drive. (not present). I have even tried disk utility, but all the options are greyed out.
I am a graphic designer, and so i use my external drive extensively to move artwork around, so it is important that i can make it writable. It worked perfectly on this very same machine, two weeks ago, and nothing has changed on the drive, so i can only assume it is a software issue on the operating system.
I have read through all the forums, etc, and can find nothing that works. I am loath to change anything on the drive, as it was working perfectly on this system before the system went in for its repair.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-Captain Zub-

Please post a screenshot of Disk Utility that shows what you mean. Be careful not to include any private information.
Start a reply to this message. Click the camera icon in the toolbar of the editing window and select the image file to upload it. You can also include text in the reply.

When using a Seagate 1T external hard drive and Time Machine to back up hourly, if I delete photo files from the Mac hard drive before the next back up, are these retained on the Seagate drive or will they be lost (overwritten) in the next backu in the ne

Does Time Machine erase previously saved files if, say, photos are deleted from the Macbook upon the next update, or will they be stored indefinately despite the current status of the files stored on the computer? Eg. can I bckup photo files to a Seagate 1T disc and then delete them to make more room on the computer in the knowlwdge that they are always going to be on the Seagate disc? Sorry if this is very elementary but I have not used a back up before like this, and am not sure how successive backups are overlaid or retained. Thanks!!

TM is not designed to do what you ask. As Allan wrote TM is an incremental backup not an archival solution.
If you delete a file from the HD it will eventually be removed from the TM backup (if it ever makes it on to the backup at all).
How long before it is removed depends on a number of factors, TM disk drive size being one factor but not the only one.
Material that is impossible to replace and is important to you (image files usually fitting that description) need to be backed up to as least one other drive and preferably more for long term storage.

External Seagate drive suddenly "not readable" by iMac

I'm having a problem with a Seagate Backup Plus external desktop hard drive.
It was working fine, but then I restarted my computer and got a window with the error message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." and options to Initialize…, Ignore, or Eject.
I rebooted my computer a few times, and each time I get the same error message. When I open Disk Utility, I see the hard drive listed in the side bar, but it is not mounted and will not mount. Each time it is labeled something like "disk2s2," "disk10s2" or "disk6s2," etc. That changes slightly each time like that, but seems to always begin with "disk" and end with "s2."
I ran repair disk and got the following result:
The drive is about three months old. I think it did something like this when I first bought it (I remember seeing the "disk2s2" label in the Disk Utility sidebar), but restarting solved it then. Now it seems to keep happening every time I restart.
I would really appreciate any help or information any of you can provide.

External hard drive spontaneously unmounted? Try these tips:
NEW FIRMWARE: Try updating your external hard drive's firmware, which is available from your drive manufacturers Web site--or just use VersionTracker's (www.versiontracker.com) search function to find it. Be sure to back up your data before applying the update, and carefully follow the manufacturers instructions.
OUT OF iSIGHT: If you're using an iSight camera while you're using a FireWire drive, the camera may be interfering with the drive's ability to stay mounted. Try temporarily disconnecting your iSight and moving it to a separate FireWire port. If you have multiple FireWire devices, try using a FireWire hub.
POWER PROBLEM: A faulty power adapter could be causing your drive to unmount. Your drive may not be getting enough juice to stay on, causing the drive to turn off and thereby unmounting it from your Mac. Alternately, the power adapter may not be providing a steady amount of power, causing your drive to turn on and off. Try replacing the adapter. If you can't get a replacement adapter from the hard drive manufacturer, try your local electronics store. Just make sure the adapter you choose has the same connector and input/output voltage. you can find the input/output voltage on the adapter itself.
Cheers!
DALE

A Tale of a Filevault Disaster and Recovery...

Recently, one of my customers had a major disaster with their MacBook running 10.5.8:
It all started when they decided they needed to free up some disk space on the internal drive, and thus they began to trash a large number of files to accomplish this.
Apparently in doing so, they must have trashed some key files because they managed to permanently lock themselves out of their Filevault-encrypted Home folder; the filevault password no longer worked when they attempted to log back in after a restart, and after numerous unsuccessful login attempts, they received the message "your filevault-protected home folder did not open and needs to be repaired. Click OK to repair the folder.." Clicking OK did nothing, and at that point they requested my services.
Turns out also, they had no recent backup; the last backup was over 2 years old- they had misplaced the power cable for their Time Machine backup drive- a WD MyBook- and had never replaced it... (oye vay)
When I got the machine, I used the installer cd to create a root user and look at the internal drive's status- 53G of 233G used. Over the course of several days, I took the following actions:
1. Restarted and logged in as root, I attempted to open the user's sparsebundle with no success.
2. Restarted to the installer CD and ran Disk Utility's Repair Disk which returned no errors. Attempted to Repair Permissions but got no result appearing to hang..
3. Figuring "Ok, I can't open the sparsebundle yet, so I'll at least start improving the overall health of the file system"- I started up the MB in Target Disk Mode connected to my G5 Quad running 10.5.7. From my G5, I used DU and Diskwarrior against the MB's single volume internal drive. DU returned no errors but Diskwarrior returned problems in red on a directory rebuild, so I repeated with Diskwarrior until all was green (3x).
4. After this, tried again to open the user's sparsebundle with same negative result of the password not working.
5. At this point, running out of solutions but anticipating eventual success (against all odds) I copied the sparsebundle to a spare drive as a backup.
6. Did a Google search and eventually found an archived Apple discussions thread which seemed to indicate a possible solution:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5881960
To make a long story a bit shorter, what eventually totally saved my bacon was this info in a post by GuyEWhite in the archived thread:
<<< So Guy, if you're out there- A MILLION Thanks!! >>>
7. Type: sudo hdiutil attach /Users/username/username.sparseimage -nomount
8. A bunch of funky things will happen, but it eventually should list a number of volumes, one with an HFS attached to it, note if it says disk1s1 or disk2s2 or whatever.
9. Type: sudo fsck_hfs -f /dev/rdisk2s2 (rdisk2s2 being where the HFS was from step 8, adding an "r" at the front)
If fsck_hfs bails because of too many errors, just repeat until it says the FS is fine. That irks the bejeezus out of me as well, but has always worked for me so far.
7. Still in TDM, and working on the backup copy, I used the above commands to first "see" the sparsebundle volume, and then to run fsck against it. Sure enough, my results were similar to the above: major errors returned the first 3 or 4 times I ran it, then eventually it said the FS was OK, and then VOILA! My first success- the sparsebundle volume actually mounted in Disk Utility and Diskwarrior, both of which were running in the background.
8. The Filevault password now worked, and I ran Diskwarrior's "Rebuild Directory" multiple times against the mounted sparsebundle volume. Numerous errors were evident and Diskwarrior created a "Rescued Items" folder.
Obviously, whatever the client had done did a major FUBAR to her home folder. Eventually the number of errors in red was reduced to a point where it would not reduce further. About 1G of data appeared to be in the Filevaulted Home folder. This didn't square with the supposed size of the sparsebundle, but I left that issue hanging for the moment.
9. I repeated the command line procedure against the MB's internal drive- successfully mounting and decrypting the Filevaulted Home folder. Similar results were obtained where it took multiple passes of fsck to mount the disk, then a number of passes of Diskwarrior to repair the directory as much as possible.
10. Knowing that I had rescued at least some of the client's files, and that I had a "repaired" backup of the sparsebundle- I decided at this point to wipe the MB's interal drive and do a complete re-install of the system and all software updates- knowing I would be eventually transferring her user files back over.
11. Back to the discrepancy of visible files in the mounted sparsebundle:
I decided to get out the howitzers and use Data Rescue.
A "deleted files" scan found another 28G of actual user files!
12. The task of organizing and transferring the user files back over to the MacBook was pretty labor-intensive but ultimately pretty successful for the most part; there were however a significant number of corrupted files which could not be salvaged. These mostly included user prefs, some Pages documents, and some images. Most all of her music and movies were still intact.
At first I tried repairing some of the corrupt image files by using Graphic Converter to re-save images that Photoshop otherwise couldn't open. This proved to be incredibly tedious and instead, I simply imported all the images en masse into iPhoto. iPhoto very nicely refused import of all the corrupted images (something like a couple hundred out of multiple thousands).
The end result was quite satisfactory: I got the client a new power cable for their MyBook and a did a complete Time Machine backup to it. They were quite happy since I had recovered just about all their documents, music, movies, and photos...
But without finding that post and method by GuyEWhite, the outcome probably would have been far different, so again- thanks Guy!
<Edited by Host>

This is the single most useful entry for FileVault problems I ever encountered! Thanks a lot!
Just a few notes to add:
(1) Use this to access your FileVault image:
sudo hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite -noautofsck -noverify /Users/(username)/(username).sparsebundle
Reminder: "(username)" is your short username. This will prevent Snow Leopard from traing to repair while accessing the FileVault bundle.
If your computer crashed your sparsebundle will be at "/Users/.(username)/(username).sparsebundle", not at "/Users/(username)/(username).sparsebundle", the difference is the "." in the folder name!
(2) After repairing with fsck_hfs you should detach the sparse bundle again:
hdiutil detach /dev/diskX
where "X" can be anything from 0 to whatever, matching the output after the "hdiutil attach" command.
Beswt,
Apple*

Is anyone doing disaster recovery for a J2EE application?

We generally use database log shipping to maintain a standby database for our ABAP instances. We can successfully fail over our production application to our disaster recovery site with no real issues. With the J2EE instances (EP, ESS/MSS, BI, etc), we have a few concerns:
hostname cannot change, without going through a system copy procedure, so we would have to keep the hostnames in DR the same. (for example, ref: oss note 757692 - changing hostname is not supported)
fully qualified domain name - from what I understand, there are potentially issues with changing the fqdn, for example SSO certificates, BSPs, XI has issues, etc.
we can't keep both hostname and fqdn the same between DR and production, or we could never do a DR test.
Has anyone implemented disaster recovery for any SAP J2EE application that has run into these concerns and addressed them? Input would be greatly appreciated regarding how you addressed these issues, or how you architected your disaster recovery implementation.
Regards,
David Hull
The Walt Disney Company

I haven't done this personally, but I do have some experience with these issues in different HA environments.
To your first point: You can change the hostname, note 757692 tells you exactly how to do it. However like the note says, "Changing the name of a host server in a production system is not automatically supported by SAP." When it says "supported by SAP" I think it means SAP the company, not SAP's software. So I would contact SAP to see if this configuration would be covered under your service agreement. Then you have to think about whether you want to do something that isn't "officially supported" by SAP. Also I'm sure you'll need some kind of additional licensing for the DR systems as their hardware keys will de different.
To your second point: As for SSO certs (SAP Login Tickets), I think they should still work as long as the SID and client number of the issuing system remain the same. I don't think they are hostname or fqdn dependant. For BSPs I would think they would still work as long as they use relative paths rather than absolute paths. And for XI... I have no idea what kind of issues may arise, I'm not an XI guy.
Again, I haven't done what you're describing myself. This is just based on my HA experiences.
Hope this helps a little,
Glenn

Need Help In Returning to Mail; Thunderbird Creates Disaster!

What I love about Mail is that I use multiple Macs and can keep all my .Mac and other email on the respective email servers, thus having access to all my email on all my machines wherever I might be. What I don't like about Mail is the weak spam filter.
So, I tried Mozilla's Thunderbird and disasterous results. Whereas Mail keeps all emails on your respective email servers by default, Thunderbird yanks all messages off the servers and puts them on your local computer, by default, and without asking your permission to do so.
Does anyone know how I can import all that Thunderbird mail back to Mail? Mozilla's instructions on how to do so don't work.
Thanks.

My "judgemental and condesending attitude" is a consequence of your judgemental and outrageous attitude towards other people's work. It's you who started this thread with the wrong attitude. My attitude is a direct consequence of that.
is not helpful on a forum like this
Well, that's debatable, especially taking into consideration that how I behave depends entirely on how the participant I'm "talking" with behaves. I can see why my attitude might appear not being helpful to someone with your attitude, though.
and unquestionably out of the ordinary
This I agree with. Other participants might simply have ignored you, as I usually do in cases such as this. It happens, however, that your wrong comments could mislead other users into believing that Thunderbird could cause them some "disaster", which is clearly not the case, so I felt that I had to reply to you somehow.
You are wrong in your comments and you clearly have
no idea what you are talking about.
LOL. Are you sure it's me who doesn't know what is he/she talking about? Would you dare enlightening me?
your further comments are way out of line.
Keeping people like me from making such comments is easy. Just don't make yourself comments which are also way out of line, such as "Thunderbird Creates Disaster!" when what happened in fact is just that you didn't set up the account the way you wanted it to work.
Perhaps you might be better served to keep your "preachy"
opinions to yourself.
If you don't like your way out of line comments to be refuted in a similar way, then it's you who should keep your "preachy" opinions to yourself. It's you who started this thread and chose the tone that should be used in it, remember?

Seagate XT 'disaster' redux

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