Headdesk - Seagate SATA drives are Windows-only crap

[mdlbear]

So, of course, after picking up a 500GB IDE drive at Fry's on Wednesday that I turned out not to need as urgently as I feared, it's $50 cheaper in today's flier.

13:14 ... and after having made plans for the damned thing, the fileserver is down again. Did I mention that this is getting tiresome? Did I mention that it only happens with recent Seagate drives? My Maxtor and Western Digital SATA drives work just fine, thank you. I see another trip to Fry's in my near future.

13:51 ... comments to this article have suggestions for the Seagate "FreeAgent" external USB drives; these probably won't work for internal SATA (I know for a fact that sdparm doesn't believe that they're SCSI drives) but I might be able to do it using an external USB enclosure. It's not a satisfactory solution, however.

14:56 ... it may be possible to turn off the offending features by running (get this) a DOS program. Fortunately it boots from a CD using a copy of FreeDOS included in the ISO.

Basically, Seagate does not support anything but Windows and wishes all other OSs would go away. The drive is, nevertheless, listed as Linux-compatible. Their FreeAgent Pro external drives, which have a FireWire port, aren't particularly well-supported for Mac, either. Apparently the only supported way to fix some problems with these drives is to plug them into a Windows machine. Feh!

I really wish my OLPC would arrive.

Comments

[chaoswolf]

OLPC? Nani?

[mdlbear]

One Laptop Per Child. The cute green laptops.

[chaoswolf]

Ah, right. Nevermind. Back to math. And I swear, some of these are trick questions.