Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

Checking your Seagate Barracuda drive’s serial number on a Mac

Some people have reported a problem with their Seagate hard drives that can make it look like your drive is gone or won’t mount. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22. The problem has been tracked to a firmware issue, and Seagate has published instructions on their site to find out if your hard drive might be affected.

As is often the case, if you’re on a Mac, the instructions on Seagate’s website aren’t written for you, so here are the steps to follow:

A) Go to Seagate’s instruction page.

B) Skip Step 1 on that page, since it’s for PCs only.

C) Instead of Step 1, from your computer’s Apple menu (upper left corner of your screen), select About This Mac, then click the button More Info. This will open the System Profiler.

D) From the menu on the left, select Hardware > Serial-ATA, and you will see your hard drives listed.

E) Select each one, and look for the lines for Model and Serial Number. Those are the two you’ll put into the tools on the Seagate website.

F) Go back to the Seagate instruction page and follow steps 2 and 3.

Labels: Apple, how-to, Mac, tech

Posted by espd at 7:52 PM | 
Share and enjoy:  | Email this: