Seagate Freeagent

So after losing my hard drive to an untimely and somewhat messy death, I decided to go out and get an external hard drive to back up my data. I went to Best Buy and picked up a 250 GB Seagate Freeagent hard drive. During the final death throes I did manage to attach it and retrieve a few of my files.

I was a little hesitant to hook it up to the new laptop. I really am not sure why that was. But I finally got up the nerve to attach it to my new system this weekend. When I first tried to attach it, Ubuntu could see it but couldn't do anything with it. Not to worry, as I know there is a lot of support out there I just have to go find it.

Hop on to google, and do a search for the problem. Voila'! Up comes a number of similar problems and the solutions that they found. Before I went too far however I wanted to see if it was a Linux problem or a Seagate problem. So, hook it up to the home Windows system and see what happens.

Well, the problem couldn't be disastrous. Windows can see the drive and more importantly see what is on it. One of the error messages from Linux (didn't screen shot them - file that one away for future references) was that the device hadn't been closed properly or some such. So, now that I'm done on Windows, use the "safely remove the hardware" option and let's hook it back up to the Linux machine.

I move the hard drive over to the laptop and Linux sees it as before. But this time, not only does it see the drive - miracle of miracles - it can see the files and open them!

Now this does make me curious as to why it had the problem with the hard drive before. Was it a momentary glitch, or was it because I hadn't shut down the drive properly the last time I had used it? To be fair, when that happened the whole system crashed and there was no way to do that.

But I suppose that all is well that ends well. I don't think that trying to replicate the problem is such a good idea. That is definitely a sleeping dog best left alone.