My stepson said that he "re-formatted" my new Seagate Free Agent USB 2.0 500 gigabyte desktop drive on my MAC. So, now when I plug it into my computer I don't see any icons or anything? I don't know what to do next? How do I find the Seagate? How do I back up my MAC?

Yes you can, but use the FAT32 format, it is the only format that both can read and write to.

if you still can see files on the Hard disk from MAC, then the reason of being unabe to explore your file from MS windows is that your hard was initialized by MAC with a format that windows cannot read.
move your data from external hard disk to your MAC then format your hard disk from windows OS with FAT32 format .this format is readable on both MAC and WINDOWS

So I would suggest a few things for this issue. First check the format of the drive you are trying to plug in. You can do this on your Mac by using Disk Utility (Applications - Utilities - Disk Utility). Plug in the drive and open Disk Utility and click on the partition. At the bottom of the Disk Utility window it lists the information about the drive. You are specifically interested in the "Format" item. If your drive is formatted Mac OS Extended or some other Mac format you probably cannot use it on the Sony Blue Ray player. Most device look for and are only compatible with Windows type formats. For example, NTFS or FAT32. The best way to test if this is really the problem, or a systemic problem with the BR player would be to pick up a USB jump drive somewhere (they are cheap if you don't have one just laying around.) Format the jump drive to a FAT32 or NTFS file system using Disk Utility. Copy the files you want to view to the jump drive (Be sure to check the file type compatibility chart on the Sony website or in the manual and make sure what you are trying to view matches those types.) Plug that in and see if you are successful. Also there was a few notes on forums that Sony doesn't support actual hard drives on the BR players which would suggest that they only support Jump drives and FAT32 because of the file size limitations it brings. Try this and let me know how it goes. Attached is a picture of my Free Agent drive formatted for Mac in Disk Utility .

For a MAC to use an external Hard drive, the hard drive has to be formatted FAT32 file system. That is the only file system MAC sees.

the soft ware that comes with it will also be erased, as it is a windows based identification,seagate free agent has mac utilities on its site, try to find out on www.seagate.com. you will find one for mac format and mac installation .

Your Mac would have formatted the Seagate drive as HFS+ (journaled) format. If you have access to a Mac, copy your data off the Seagate to any Mac, then use your PC to reformat the Seagate drive in FAT32 format. Macs recognize FAT32 format, and can store data in it, but can't create the format. The Mac holding your data can store it on the Seagate in the FAT32 format, and you can then copy the files to your PC. Hope this helps.

The problem is because Mac cannot write to NTFS formatted drives. You will have to reformat the drive in Mac. You will loose all the data :( Here is a link for the how to:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=174395

Hello,
If you can see the drive in Applications --> utilities --> Disk Utility, then you will be able to reformat it in the Mac OS format and read it.
Good day, Damien

Hi, Sorry to hear you are having problems,
When you open your hard drive, is it locked ? Do you see a pencil with a line through it in the bottom left had corner ?
It could be that the drive has inproper permissions....
So, try this, click on the Hard drive icon (Please be sure it is the external drive, NOT YOUR STARTUP DISK ) then get info on the drive. In this info window, at the very bottom, you should see a check box allowing for: ignore ownership on this volume. Please click this box.
Now, try creating folders on the drive...
If this does not work, I highly recommend reformatting this Hard Drive, that is assuming there is no valuable information on it.
After reformatting it, it really should work porperly.

465.66 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 499,998,617,764 bytes. The problem is the definition of gigabytes.