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I'm not incredibly knowledgeable about computers and I really need some help.

Just got a Seagate external firewire drive this morning. I downloaded the necessary pc driver (Paragon HFS+ for Windows 8) through their website per the instructions that came with the drive. After installation, I restarted and the pc recognized the firewire drive just fine. About three hours into copying files from my pc to the firewire drive, it gave me an error and told me the files couldn't be copied. When I clicked to get out of the message, the computer crashed. After an hour of it trying to repair itself in safe mode, it restored me to an earlier version before the system crashed. Here's my current dilemma:

The Paragon HFS+ is still showing up in my programs as installed, but the Device Manager is not recognizing the drive. When I try to uninstall and reinstall Paragon, it interrupts me with a message saying "The setup must update files or services that cannot be updated while the system is running" and basically gives me the finger. I have no idea what to do now, as it won't let me uninstall and reinstall Paragon, and I have no idea why it crashed my computer in the first place. Is there possibly another Mac - PC firewire driver I can try downloading instead? I really don't know what I'm doing and any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Can you confirm that your drive is still working (from OSX)? It sounds like your drive is dead.
    – ZippyV
    Jun 26, 2011 at 22:22
  • Oh, and I don't know if this info helps or not, but before it crashed I got the blue screen of death and it said something on there about dumping data.
    – Steve
    Jun 26, 2011 at 22:25
  • I'm such a noob...I don't think the drive is dead, it's humming along and the lights are on.
    – Steve
    Jun 26, 2011 at 22:30
  • I am having the same problem with an internal HDD (MBP early 2011 - Windows 8 Pro x64 - OSX 10.8) - When ever I restart my computer I have to run the installer again (it works before I restart it).
    – Tyler Wall
    Sep 7, 2012 at 17:55
  • Try to reinstall Paragon while booting in Safe mode (see link).
    – harrymc
    Jan 15, 2017 at 12:59

1 Answer 1

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It sounds like the model or SKU of Seagate FireWire external drive you bought was targeted at the Mac market and perhaps came preformatted as HFS+, but there's no reason to keep it that way if you're going to be using it with Windows.

When I set up an external hard drive for use between OSes, I usually format it with multiple partitions: An HFS+ partition for Mac-specifc use, a FAT32 partition for cross-platform use, and, if necessary, an NTFS partition for Windows-specific use (I'm primarily a Mac user so I don't always need an NTFS partition). Mac OS X, Windows, and many other OSes read and write FAT32 reliably out of the box. It's a lot easier to use FAT32 for cross-platform purposes than trying to get Windows to read/write HFS+ or trying to get Mac OS X to write NTFS (Macs have read-only support for NTFS out of the box, but write support requires aftermarket software).

For best results make sure the partition table format on the drive is the more modern GUID Partition Table (GPT) standard, rather than the deprecated legacy Master Boot Record (MBR) format.

If you don't need to try to rescue any of the data off the drive, then just repartition/reformat it.

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