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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Mac Intel Core Duo Crashing

jimbridger - Apr 9, 2007 - 10:49 am

I have several new Seagate 750 gig external hard drives. They worked fine until recently. I now plug one or the other into my Macbook Pro and it crashes the system. The type of crash that a curtain falls down over the screen and a message comes up that says I have to push the power button down for several seconds to do a hard shut down. The only change that I made recently was the recent MAC OSX update. I plug the same drives into a Windows XP machine and they show up fine. Anyone else out there with similar problems? I looked into calling Seagate but of course they're closed on weekends.

jimbridger - Apr 9, 2007 - 10:54 am

I recently tried working on this problem again. I tried the Seagate drives on the MacBook Pro 10.4.9 and still it will not see them. I realized we had another MAC in the office that was not upgraded to the 10.4.9 and is still running 10.4.8. The Seagates worked fine on 10.4.8 prior to my upgrade to 10.4.9. Interestingly, the other MAC with the 10.4.8 no longer recognizes the Seagates either. However, the Windows XP machine still recognizes them.

ishan - Apr 9, 2007 - 8:16 pm

USB or Firewire or eSATA?

jimbridger - Apr 10, 2007 - 9:41 am

USB 2.0

jimbridger - Apr 11, 2007 - 11:12 am

I just received a message stating that you are waiting patiently. My last reply was to inform you that it is a USB 2.0. I heard nothing back since my last reply. Please advise.

ishan - Apr 11, 2007 - 9:38 pm

Some Seagate drives are not fully compatible with Macintosh computers, particularly the Mac Pro. This _might_ be part of the problem. What happens if you plug in the drive before you boot up? Also, does the enclosure have a built in powered hub? If so, there's been reports of a kernel panic (what you describe) when these drives are used with 10.4.9. The only solution in that instance is to switch the drive to a case without a powered hub.

Does the drive misbehave when connected via Firewire (if you have that option)? If it doesn't, then consider a new cable.

Are the drives formatted as GUID? USB drives formatted as GUID with Disk Utility are bootable on Intel-based Macs, and it may be a good idea to reformat the drive in the GUID format, even if you are not using it as a bootable drive.

Do the drives mount OK if you use a different Mac running 10.4.9?

Are the drives bus-powered (can't imagine that they are). If they are, they're not going to get another power to run off a USB 2.0 on a Mac laptop. Your options then are to find an AC adapter or get one ofthe inexpensive USB 2.0 cables which connects the drive to two USB 2.0 ports simultaneously to get adequate power.

Have you tried a different USB 2.0 cable?

I have about six of these 750 GB drives and stopped using them, instead using the Seagate 500 Gb drives in a RAID 0 configuration so in my MacPro, I essentially have two 1 TB drives. Now that the TB drives are out, I'll try the Apple-certified ones. Note that with the new octocore MacPros, Apple only uses their Apple-certified 750 GB Seagates (althoug $449 is way too much for one of these drives, let alone four of them).

You might want to call macsales.com (OWC). I am just a satisfied customer and they can tell you where you can find the flashing utility from Seagate to flash these drive if needed to make them fully Mac-compatible. The flasher is Windos only, but that shouldn't be a problem with the MacBook Pro as long as you have a copy of XP or Vista you can use to create a Windows partition-or use Parallels or VMWare Fusion if you want to live life on the leading edge

Hope that helps and please let us know what happens. Thanks.

jimbridger - Apr 12, 2007 - 9:32 am

Thanks for the info. I'll keep this short since you covered about everything I need to know. The main thing is I'm going to ditch these drives and go to something more compatible. I was already looking at the 500's you mentioned. This is a pain however but I guess I've just been bitten by the windows Goliath bug.