Seagate is one of the most famous brands for the external hard drive. Its big storage is used for users to save multiple important documents, videos, photos, and other types of files. However, it still happens that all data just have gone or you deleted files accidentally and want to do Seagate file recovery on Mac. Actually, you can. Let me explain recover Seagate external hard drive on Mac in details.

• Seagate Hard Drive Mac
• Format Seagate Hard Drive
• How To Format Seagate Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

How to Format a Seagate Hard Drive for Mac. Just one moment. Before you go ahead and format your Seagate external hard drive on your MacBook or iMac. Ask yourself if there any files on there you want. Because formatting means you won’t be able to get to any of those files on the drive once you have formatted it.

1. A hard drive can be used on any type of computer - PC or Mac. But in order for the computer and drive to talk to one another, the drive has to be formatted. This article explains. Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities.
2. The Simple and Easy Steps to Formatting your Seagate Drive on Your Mac 1. Log into your Mac. And Plug in your Seagate Drive. Your Seagate external hard drive unless it’s one of Seagate‘s desktop drives. Takes it’s juice, its power from your Mac, along its USB cable. And that means you’ll need enough battery power in your MacBook Pro or Air to drive the Seagate drive.

First and for the most, you need to know that all data saved on the Seagate external hard drive is still there. If you delete some files from it, these files are still there as well, but invisible. The theory is: the storage is fixed, and if you delete some files, they’re still there and invisible, waiting to be replaced by new data. In this case, if new data is not created after you losing files from the Seagate external hard drive, then there is a chance for you to recover them. In summary, before you learn how do you recover files from Seagate external hard drive on Mac, stop using the external hard drive right away.

As I have mentioned all the lost or deleted files in Seagate external hard drive are invisible. To Seagate file recovery on Mac, you need the help of iBeesoft Data Recovery for Mac, a professional data recovery software tool specially designed to recover files from external hard drive, Mac laptop/desktop, USB flash drive, SD card and more. Here are some of its main features:

Seagate Hard Drive Mac

Your Safe & Effective Seagate File Recovery Mac Software

• Restore more than 1000 file types, including videos, photos, images, documents and more from Seagate external hard drive on Mac.
• Quick Scan mode scans for files quickly and Deep Scan mode is sector-by-sector analyzed to ensure a higher Seagate file recovery Mac rate.
• Supports Recover Seagate external hard drive on Mac, including file lost due to deleted, Seagate external hard drive formatted, not accessible, etc.
• Fully compatible with macOS to recover deleted/lost files from Mac, Seagate external hard drives, etc.

Actually, no matter for what reason you want to recover data from Seagate external hard drive on Mac, like virus attack, Seagate external hard drive damaged, purposely deletion or unintentional deletion, inaccessible, formatted, diskpart, and more, if you can connect the Seagate external hard drive with your Mac and your Mac can detect it as an external hard drive, you can follow the guide below to learn the details for how to recover deleted files from Seagate external hard drive on Mac or how to Seagate external hard drive data recovery on Mac.

Steps to Seagate External Hard Drive File Recovery on Mac

Click the download button to get the Mac version of Seagate data recovery software. It’s fully compatible with all the macOS, including the latest Mojave. Since this kind of tool is not allowed to publish on the App Store, so you can’t download it from the App Store. It’s a safe tool, feel free to download it and perform lost file recovery on Mac.

Step 1. Choose File Types to Scan

Connect your Seagate external hard drive with your Mac, making sure it appears like an external hard drive on your Mac. Next, launch the Seagate file recovery Mac software and select the file types you’re going to recover from the Seagate device. After then, click 'Start'.

Step 2. Choose Seagate External Hard Drive to Scan

In the next step, you can see all the partitions, external hard drives on the Mac are listed. From the list, choose Seagate external hard drive from which you want to recover data from, and click 'Scan'. It takes a while for the software to scan for the files you need from the Seagate external hard drive. Be patient. The default scan mode is Quick Scan.

Step 3. Recover Files from Seagate External Hard Drive on Mac

Format Seagate Hard Drive

After the Quick Scan, you can see all the complete files the software has found for you. Filter out the needed files from the left side with file types and file extension. Preview the files and choose need to recover from Seagate external hard drive on Mac.

By default, the used scan mode is Quick Scan. If you still can’t find the deleted or lost files from Seagate external hard drive. I suggest you try the Deep Scan. The Seagate external hard drive file recovery Mac program will scan files even with incomplete file properties for you. Longer means more files found. Try your luck.

So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.

That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.

Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.

Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.

Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS

During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.

Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).

When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.

When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.

It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.

I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:

Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)

What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.

How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?

Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.

Step 1: Open Disk Utility.

The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.

Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.

Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.

A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.

Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.

By the way, you can also rename your external drive.

Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.

For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.

You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:

Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.

How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac

If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.

Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.

Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.

After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.

After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.

How To Format Seagate Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

Step 3: Confirm your operation.

Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue. Pc matic for mac.

Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”

To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.

That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.