External Hard-drive Error. Need Help ASAP

[celfied]

Hello everyone. I bought a Seagate 1TB for my mac book pro and I'm running into problems installing it. When I first plugged in the USB, it gave me the option of backing up my files on my Time Machine. I figured what the hell and did that. Half way through, it gave me an error and prevented me from putting anything on it. Then once I went through the process of installing the hard drive with the partitions and all of that, it gave me an error right at the end where you're supposed to it 'Apply' after everything. The Time Machine also magically had some files there to begin with that I discovered in the midst of this. I've never used it.

An hour went by and the Seagate randomly let me put files on it making me think that it had started working for some reason and then after I had some success, random errors started coming up, one of the main ones being Error -50 and it's extremely frustrating. I don't know what to do. The Seagate says that it's installed (it went as far to ask me to restart and register it) but it's still giving me trouble. Then anytime I try to reprogram it by unmounting it, it doesn't let me.

What should I do? Can anyone help me? Thanks.

Update: The errors now are Error -36 and -8061

 

[keysofanxiety]

Hello everyone. I bought a Seagate 1TB for my mac book pro and I'm running into problems installing it. When I first plugged in the USB, it gave me the option of backing up my files on my Time Machine. I figured what the hell and did that. Half way through, it gave me an error and prevented me from putting anything on it. Then once I went through the process of installing the hard drive with the partitions and all of that, it gave me an error right at the end where you're supposed to it 'Apply' after everything. The Time Machine also magically had some files there to begin with that I discovered in the midst of this. I've never used it.

An hour went by and the Seagate randomly let me put files on it making me think that it had started working for some reason and then after I had some success, random errors started coming up, one of the main ones being Error -50 and it's extremely frustrating. I don't know what to do. The Seagate says that it's installed (it went as far to ask me to restart and register it) but it's still giving me trouble. Then anytime I try to reprogram it by unmounting it, it doesn't let me.

What should I do? Can anyone help me? Thanks.

Update: The errors now are Error -36 and -8061

OK, what we're going to try and do is check to see if the external drive is corrupted. Although you've just bought it, it's pretty unlikely it may be D.O.A, but it's worth checking first because this doesn't take long.

The first thing to do is to download and install this application which will allow OS X to view SMART information for external drives. Once that's installed, restart your Mac with the option 'reopen windows when logging back in' disabled.

Then, providing you're on Mavericks or higher, download and run SMART Utility. Please let me know if you're on an earlier OS and I'll supply a different version of this.

SMART Utility will then display the SMART information for both your internal and external HDD. Does the external drive show as 'Failing' or is that 'Passed'? If it's failing, get it replaced.

If it shows as being passed, turn off your Mac. As soon as you turn it back on, hold CMD+R on startup to boot into the recovery partition (OS X Utilities), then open Disk Utility and format your external drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and restart the Mac back into the OS. By formatting the disk outside of the OS, this should hopefully bypass any conflicts that may be occuring if OS X is automatically trying to utilise it for Time Machine.

Please let me know what the news is. Speak with you soon.