I have called seagate helpline for Asia pacific (I live in Australia) but they are not listening to me and telling me to download the seagate diagnstic tools for WINDOWS and run them as they dont have any diagnostic tools for Mac. I took the hard drive and macbook to apple store genius, who looked at it and was unsure what is wrong as the drive worked perfectly fine on one his new 11" macbook air.
(I deleted the time machine back up and formatted it so i can check it on my PC) It wasn’t a gentle affair, but I did get the HDD out of the FreeAgent case unscathed. I checked it again the next day and my macbook wont recognise the hard drive, and for some for strage reasons this drive works perfectly fine on my old XP machine but shows the same problem on my wife's work computer (lennovo) running Vista. When I ran Disk Utility, the disk read clean, so I figured it was something to do with the external enclosure interface. Seagate FreeAgent Go review: Seagate FreeAgent Go - CNET.
I tried again and it wont recognise the hard drive, after a few attempts finally my mac recognised the drive and completed the time machine backup. Inside the box, there are: FreeAgent Go drive FreeAgent software (Seagate Manager) pre-loaded on the drive (no CD and for Windows only though) for backup, recovery, synchronization, encryption and power management. If it’s your case, the beeps should be gone after the disk gets enough power. Alternatively, you can try a USB Y-cable, which will get power from two USB ports to your drive. If it’s USB 2.0, you can try fixing Seagate external hard drive beeping by upgrading USB port. It started doing the backup and after around 75% it gave me an error message as if if i have removed a USB drive without safely ejecting it. Fix: First, identify the ports on your PC or Mac. In the left pane, click Choose what the power button does. Go to the Hardware and Sound section, and select Power Options. Method 1: Change a USB port: In case the Seagate external HDD is not showing up on the system, you need to change the USB port firstly. From the list of results, select Control Panel. Disable Fast Startup Press Windows Key + S, and type Control Panel.
I purchased a 500GB FreeAgent GoFLex to use as a time machine backup on my snow leopard 10.6.8 Fix the Seagate external hard drive problems on Windows 10 3.1.