Seagate USB2 Free Agent questions...

Erik Olson

Erik Olson

Unscripted Mod
Staff member
HVX200 shoot tomorrow with a 160GB Free Agent drive. It is apparently formatted as NTFS.

Will this be an issue and will Avid and / or FCP be able to take the files?

I do not see a way to change the format to FAT32.

I've tested the drive with a 4GB card, but not a full one or a 16GB. I am able to play the files from the Free Agent drive as a virtual card within P2Viewer.

So, I guess my additional questions are.
  1. Will the NTFS partition properly to full P2 cards - 16GB too?
  2. Will an Avid and / or FCP machine be able to work with the NTFS drive?
  3. With the drive empty of everything (save for what Seagate ships it with), is it possible / necessary to reformat to FAT32 without losing functionality?
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If you are on a MAC there is a means of making it a FAT32. It is in the format Drive area on the MAC and it seems like it talks about MS-Dos as the lingo. I have only done it once but I know itr can be done. The reason that you want it in Fat32 is so that if you want to take the disk to a PC it should be in Fat32. So since there is both Mac and PC Avids, I would want to have it in a "vanilla" drive.

Best,

Jan
 
Hi, Jan!

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I'm trying to ascertain whether they are indeed on a PC version of Avid. The client indicated PC-based, but you know... I like insurance.

So, the question is, why doesn't the option to reformat the Free Agent within Windows Explorer exist? Is there a third-party application for this? Will the drive lose any functionality (aside from 4GB partitioning) when it goes to FAT32. It is a USB bus-powered device, so I don't want to wreck the thing in the process.

e
 
Erik,

Once drives went over 32GB, the capability to format drives as FAT32 *seemingly* disappeared from Windows. It can be done, but it's requires some degree of arcane magiks to work. But, there is hope:

1) Format the drive NTFS, or if it is already NTFS, back up anything that you want to keep.
2) Download FAT32Format and run it on the drive.

That's pretty much it. In just a few moments, the drive will be FAT32, and can be read equally on Windows and MacOS. It won't be partitioned weird either--it'll be one big partition.

HTH...
 
Windows crippled their FAT32 support after Win98. You can certainly format that drive, but you need to use a third-party application, like cbrougham said. I use Swiss Knife, it's a free download.

Windows, after Win98, imposed an artificial 32GB file size limit; if you want to format a drive bigger than 32GB then Windows itself won't let you format it as FAT32. Even though it's perfectly legit to do so, Windows' Explorer refuses to do it. But these other free applications will happily do it and it works just fine.
 
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