Seagate External Hard Drive does not work on Yosemite

I'm having the same problem with my encrypted, external USB Seagate drive. I use this drive as my external library for iTunes, iPhoto as well as Time Machine. From what I've read it looks like Yosemite changes the partition table on the external drive. Upon connecting the drive, Finder asks for my password as normal. After I enter it, the system stays in a frozen state with the password box grayed out. After about 60 seconds (which I assume is a timeout of the software) the password box goes away. Disk Utility can see the external drive and its single partition, but it can't mount the partition. Repair Disk times out after a long time and says it can't fix it, despite all the history that looks like its going well.

Other threads here have suggested a kext utility 2.6.1 (this is a utility that is used for getting a Hackintosh to work). That didn't have any impact on my system. I've booted the machine to a Mavericks flash drive to run disk utility there and that was no help. I can change the encryption passphrase just fine in disk utility.

This all happened to me as the result of the most recent Yosemite update that I installed yesterday. Not the actual installation of Yosemite. At this point my drive appears hosed until I can find something that can read this new partition style. I've read that it's a difference from the typical journaled hfs+ system we've been used to for so many years to a new 'core storage' system that isn't nearly as compatible.

I have a Seagate connected via USB3 and no issues. I use a docking station.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1741742&page=12

A lot more in depth knowledge on the subject of the transition from HFS+ to Core Storage. When you install Yosemite, apparently it converts drives for you, without your permission. This typically doesn't cause an issue except in the event of encrypted storage devices (i.e. Time Machine).

My drive did end up mounting after it had been connected for two hours. I'm copying all my data off right now to reformat and setup two partitions: one for time machine and one for file storage. I'll just encrypt the file storage.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but after hours of searching for an answer as to why my external hard drive did not show up on my desktop after upgrading to Yosemite, I clicked on the Finder, clicked on Preferences and under the General tab there's a section that says, "Show these items on the desktop," where I simply checked "External Drives." All is well now!

I also saw the drive change to "corestorage" which also changed my drive name. No impact to function but very annoying. I erased my partition and restored from TM then corestorage was gone and name reverted back to correct one. I've been told you can also use terminal to revert the corestorage back.

I have read that if you turn Spotlight off you will have no problems. Open Spotlight, choose "privacy", click the "+" at the lower left and add what you do not Spotlight to search. Worked for me. I have 2 internal Seagates formatted OS X journaled in an external case. 🙂🙂

For my hard drive that doesn't show up at all, the problem is not Yosemite per se. It's the USB3 driver incompatibility. Try using a USB2 cable (micro USB just like an android charger cable that plugs in half of the slot on your hard drive) and it will work. Or try connecting it to an older computer that has USB2 ports on it (with the original USB3 cable) and it will work BOTH on Yosemite and Mavericks. Of course it will transfer data at USB2 speeds. Apple screwed up the drivers again so we have to wait for them to 1. receive thousands of complaints 2. wait for eternity to acknowledge there's an issue. 3. take their sweet time fixing the USB3 drivers. Until then you can get by with USB2 cables. I hope this helps!

thanks for the advise i was thinking of upgrading and thought that something would happen where i might not gain access to my files again thank you for the advise, will upgrade only when i am sure i can access them all again via multiple backups.

Great job, dr.l33ts! The link for NTFS Drivers fixed the problem!

Thanks!

My name is Mike.

We have a Seagate Go Flex Home 3TB external drive which I haven't used for a while because we have a newer WD that works well, but I need to connect now to get some files that are only on the Seagate.

I looked to connect the Seagate to the iMac with Yosemite and no luck:

- Seagate via ethernet cable to WiFi router

- WiFi router software clearly shows the Seagate and the 192.168 IP address.

I went to Finder / Go to Folder and entered \\goflex_home, as I always used to do, and receive "the Folder can't be found." just now.

I webt to Finder / Connect to Server and entere \\goflex_home and received "There was a problem connecting to the server "\\goflex_home". The server may not exist or is unavailable at this time."

I think we purchased the drive in 2011, some four years ago.

Reading the comments I vaguely remember needing to reformat the drive with NTFS.

I remember because I was unhappy when Seagate shared those instructions.

Am I to understand from these comments that, to get the drive to work, I need reinstall the Pagagon drivers?

Why?

What do they do?

Will I lose the data on the drive?

Is there any want to get these drives to plug into the iMac, or aren't they ethernet only?

I just tried to plug into the iMac's ethernet port and no luck.

Once I download the driver, what will happen - the drive is reformatted, or it just gets a new driver, and all the files on it are untouched, but they are now accessible again?

Thanks,

Mike

It worked!!!

Thanks daman242

I had a similar problem after installing El Capitan in that Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive became read only. However I downloaded

'Paragon Driver for Mac OS' ( Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X.app ) from the Seagate site and that appears to have rectified the problem. I did however make a backup of the files just in case. Hope this is of some help

Does this solution still work if the HD is already formatted as MAC OS journaled and NOT formatted NTFS ?

Hi

Not sure if this is relevant but my Seagate drive was not formatted for MAC OS prior to installing the driver and once installed it now shows the Format as Windows NT Filesystem

Thank you...it also worked with the new OS X El Capitan 🙂