Seagate FreeAgent read only

I ran across this problem with a Seagate FreeAgent USB drive recently. On a Windows SBS 2008 Std server, I'm using two of these drives as backup drives. One of the drives came up as read-only, so I did my due diligence and searched for "seagate freeagent read only". Got a few applicable hits, but only for people who posted and really never got a solution, and from one person who changed the security settings of the drive. That didn't work because the drive couldn't be written to to change the securty settings (duh...). Well, I found a solution that worked for me (Mac users - sorry, I don't have a Macintosh available to test this)

The solution was to go into Disk Management (right-click Computer in the Start Menu, or open Administrative Tools and select "Computer Management". Then expand Storage, then click Disk Management. This works for Win2008 Vista Win2003 and XP). If the drive shows Read-only in the bottom pane of Disk Management, then right click on the box where it shows Read-only and in the context menu, click "Offline". After the drive goes offline, right-click again, and choose "Online". This restored my drive to Online (full read-write) status.