Portable External Hard Drive Quick Start
Guide
Your new Seagate® portable hard drive enables you to easily add disc space to your laptop
or desktop system, and the convenient size enables you to take the drive with you. Plus, connecting it couldn’t be easier—in most cases, you can just plug it in. You will be ready to go within seconds!
Contents
•Seagate external hard drive with a USB 2.0 interface
•USB 2.0 ‘Y’ cable
•Quick Start Guide
•Seagate Extra Value CD
Requirements
Windows
•Windows XP
•Windows 2000 Pro
•Windows Me
•Windows 98SE
Macintosh
•Macintosh System 9.2.2 (or later) or Mac OS X
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Setup
Your Portable External Hard Drive comes with a special USB cable. This cable is shaped like the letter ‘Y’ with one USB connector on one end of the cable and two connectors at the other end of the cable. This cable supplies power to the drive and handles the data going between the drive and your computer—this means you don’t have any other cables to connect.
1. Connect one end of the USB ‘Y’ cable to your Portable drive and the connector end labelled “Data + Power” to any one of the USB ports on your computer. The drive does not have a power switch, so if your computer is powered on, the drive will begin spinning as soon as you connect it to your computer.
Note: If your computer does not supply enough power to the drive through the one USB “Data + Power” connector, plug in the unused connector on the ‘Y’ cable to another USB port on your computer (or a powered USB hub). This additional connection may be needed to provide additional power to the drive and is only required if connecting the “Data + Power” connector alone does not power up
the drive.
Data + |
Power |
Power |
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USB 1.1 connectors only support transfer rates of 12 Mbits/sec. This is not ideal for disc
drives. To take advantage of the speed of this disc drive, connect it to a computer that supports high-speed USB 2.0. High-speed USB 2.0 supports transfer rates up to 480 Mbits/sec
(40 times faster than USB 1.1).
Note. A DC receptacle is available near the USB connector on the portable hard drive to enable the use of an external DC power supply. This power supply may be used to provide necessary power to the portable hard drive in the event an extra USB port is not available or the USB port(s) don’t provide enough power. See page 22 for specifications.
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2. See below for Windows OS information, or page 7 for Macintosh OS information.
These sections provide instructions about how to:
•Install drivers
•Reformat and partition the drive
•Dismount the drive
Installing drivers and reformatting are steps you only need to do one time. After that, you can use the drive by just connecting the USB cable.
Windows OS
Installing drivers for your operating system (OS)
Windows XP/2000 Pro/Me operating systems have built-in, up-to-date drivers for a USB interface. You don’t need to install any drivers if you are using one of these operating systems, but make
sure you have downloaded and installed the latest service packs from Microsoft to ensure that you have the latest drivers available for your OS.
Note. Certain OEM installations of Windows Me call for a file named USBNTMAP.SYS while attempting to load drivers for the portable drive. This file can be located on the Windows Me installation or recovery CD in the WIN9x\BASE2.CAB folder.
Windows 98SE: When you connect the drive to your computer, Windows 98SE displays the Add New Hardware wizard. This means the wizard needs to find the USB drivers included on the Seagate
Utility Toolkit CD. Follow these steps to install the drivers:
1.Insert the Seagate Utility Toolkit CD in your computer’s CD-ROM drive.
2.Click the Next button. The wizard displays a screen with two options.
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3.Select the Search for the best driver for your device option. The wizard displays four check boxes.
4.Select the CD-ROM and Specify location options. Locate the drivers in the Drivers USB
Win98 directory.
5.Click the Next button. The wizard installs the appropriate drivers on your computer and tells you when it has finished.
6.Click the Finish button to complete the installation.
7.Restart your computer. Your new drive is ready to use.
How to reformat and/or partition your drive
Your drive is factory-formatted for a FAT32 file system and no further formatting is needed for Windows operating systems.
However, if you are using Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP and you prefer to use an NTFS file system,
you can reformat with either the built-in Disk Management
application provided by Microsoft, or the Seagate DiscWizard™ for Windows application located in the files directory of the Seagate
Extra Value CD.
Caution. Reformatting destroys all data on the drive. Back up any data that you want to keep before you reformat the drive.
To use the Disk Management application:
1.Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
2.In the console tree, click
Disk Management. The Disk Management window appears. Your discs and volumes
are displayed.
3.Right-click on the drive you want to reformat (or partition) and use the options provided to reformat or partition the drive.
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To use the DiscWizard for Windows application, launch the DiscWizard for Windows application in the Files directory on the Seagate
Extra Value CD and follow the easy-to-use, on-screen instructions.
Data-sharing between Windows and Macintosh systems
Seagate does not recommend that you use your external hard drive to share data between Windows and Macintosh operating systems. This is primarily due to all of the variables in OS types and versions, formats and partitions, interfaces, and third-party connectivity software packages. If you absolutely must use your external hard drive to share data between Windows and Macintosh systems, initialize your drive (before you use it!) for a Macintosh OS, as described
below, and then purchase and install—on your Windows system— available third-party software that allows your Windows system to read from and write to a drive that is formatted for a Mac OS.
Caution. Do not leave your drive in its pre-formatted FAT32, single partition condition if you intend to transfer data between Mac and Windows systems. Doing so will result in data loss.
Dismounting your drive with Windows OS
Caution. Never physically disconnect any cable attached to the drive when the drive LED indicates disc activity—doing so will probably result in data loss.
How to dismount and disconnect the drive
1.Close all windows and quit all running applications that are stored on the drive or that are using data stored on the drive.
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2.Click the icon in your system tray that represents the Safely Remove Hardware function, and then select the Seagate external drive.
Note. The system tray is the area in the lower right portion of your desktop near the clock.
Windows OS displays a message when it is safe to disconnect the USB cable.
Macintosh OS
Format (initialize) for
Macintosh OS
Your new Seagate external hard drive is factory-formatted with a FAT32 file format. Although your Macintosh operating system may recognize and mount your new drive with this format, FAT32 is not recommended for use with a Macintosh OS. You must format your drive using one
of the Mac OS format types before you use it with your Macintosh operating system.
Reformatting takes only a few seconds using Apple’s Disk Utility, which comes with your Mac OS.
Caution: Formatting destroys all data on the drive. If you have data that you want to keep, back up the data before formatting the drive. Seagate is not responsible for lost data.
How to reformat and/or partition your drive
1.Open Disk Utility, which is located in Applications/Utilities. In Mac OS 9, this utility is named
Drive Setup.
2.Select the disc that you want to reformat and/or partition in the left column. Be sure to select the new drive, and not
an existing drive that may contain data, because reformatting and/or partitioning erases all data on the selected drive.
What is partitioning?
Partitioning divides the disc into separate volumes. It does not increase the capacity
of the drive. Creating more than one partition can be helpful in organizing your information. For example, you might want one volume (partition) to store your backups and one volume for applications
or other information. Each volume receives its own drive letter, so each volume appears to be
a separate disc drive in Windows Explorer.
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3.Click Partition if you want to partition your drive into multiple volumes, or click Erase to reformat the drive as one volume. Partitioning is not required; if you select Partition, continue to the next step. For Erase, you’re done!
4.Choose the number of partitions from the Volume Scheme pop-up menu. Click each partition and enter a name, select a format, and enter a size for each partition. (You can
also drag the partitions to change the size.) Select the Mac OS Extended format for each partition unless you have a specific need to select any other available Volume Format option.
5.Click Partition, and then click Partition again. Your drive appears on your desktop with the volume label(s) you entered in the steps above. If you elected to
partition the drive to create two or more volumes, each volume will have a drive icon and label.
Sharing data between Windows and Macintosh systems
Seagate does not recommend that you use your external hard drive to share data between Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
This is primarily due to all of the variables in OS types and versions, formats and partitions, interfaces, and third-party connectivity software packages. If you absolutely must use your external hard drive to share data between Windows and Macintosh systems, initialize your drive (before you use it!) for a Macintosh OS, as described above, and then purchase and install—on your Windows system—available third-party software that allows
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