External hard drive connected to Airport Extreme not working on PC

I have a Macbook Pro running 10.9.1 and my work laptop, which runs Windows 7. I have a WD 2TB external hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme, with 1TB formatted for Mac and the other 1TB formatted in FAT format. My Macbook can connect to the drive and read/write perfectly fine, but I'm not even seeing the drive on my PC anywhere. I'm wanting to use the Mac formatted partition to backup photos and personal documents and the FAT partition to backup my work.
Is there a setup thing I need to do on either the Airport Extreme or on my PC to connect to have the drive visible? Both drives are setup to allow file sharing and my Airport Extreme is running version 7.6.4.
Thanks!

There are 3 different methods to establish a connection from your PC to the hard drive in this Apple support document:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1331

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How do I access external hard drive connected to AirPort Extreme via iPad

Hello,
How do I access external hard drive connected to AirPort Extreme via iPad / windows laptop.
I donot have a Mac and I use windows laptop.

For your iPad, you will need an app, like FileBrowser, to access the external drive.
For your Windows laptop, you would access the drive like any other network share. The basic format is: \\<servername>\<sharename>, where, in this case, the servername is the base station name and the sharename is the name of the external drive.

Using Time Machine w/external hard drive connected to airport extreme

I hooked up an external hard drive on my airport extreme. I see it in sharing, however, Time Machine doesn't recognize it as a back-up drive unless I have it directly connected to my MacBook Pro. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the external drive when it's connected to the airport?

FWIW, the AEBS has known problems sharing a directly connected HD. Take a look over in the AEBS forums, and you'll see that this is a very common problem. Perhaps Apple will update the firmware and rectify this problem.
Cheers,
Andreas

IMac Media Server, or External Hard Drive Connected to Airport Extreme?

I would like to create a central repository for all of my movies/music which I would like to stream to an apple tv. For now, it is all iTunes compatible stuff. At the same time, i want to be able to access those media files from my iPad, iPhone, and other Mac machines throughout my house.
I currently have an iMac that is not often used. I had an idea to use it as a media server through which I could stream all of my media to the apple tv. The plan would be to buy a 3 or 4 TB hard drive, and connect the hard drive directly to the iMac (ideally via firewire), and then upload all of my movies/music to the hard drive, while keeping the libraries intact on the iMac. In addition, I would like to keep the library on my MBP, but direct the hard drive to utilize the media files on that same hard drive (so, essentially, using one set of media files, in two iTunes libraries). This way (I'm thinking), I should be able to stream my media from either library on my Apple TV (but in reality, the media is all on the one hard drive) and to my iDevices in my home.
The other option I have come up with is to connect a hard drive on the network, directly to the airport extreme (probably via USB, unless someone knows of a GE drive that is not a pre-formatted NAS server). Then I would hope to link the media libraries on both computers through to the media files stored on the hard drive.
So the questions I have are:
Which is the better set up for home streaming? Will one be faster than the other?
Is there a better way of doing this?
If I downloaded the Plex Media server to the iMac in the first option, would I be able to access all of the media on my Smart TV w/o the Apple TV?
Thanks in advance for your input.

Which is the better set up for home streaming? Will one be faster than the other?
Both will be about the same. The issue I would be sure to look at is how well the external hard drive's wake from sleep mode works. It is annoying if the drive sometimes goes to sleep and will not wake up without you waking over to the computer.
The direct connect via firewire is a slightly faster more reliable option, but not really something you will notice given the ATV would only need a fraction of the bandwith either have.
The more important thing for performace woudl be to use eithernet instead of WiFi. You will make your life a lot easer if you do not try to do streaming HD video over WiFi.
If I downloaded the Plex Media server to the iMac in the first option, would I be able to access all of the media on my Smart TV w/o the Apple TV?
No. ATV can only see content that is in your local iTunes setup or in iCloud. So in of these setups you will need the content on these drives to be added to iTunes.

Connecting to an external hard drive connected to airport extreme via usb

I have two computers running off my airport extreme base station. I have a desktop computer connected via an ethernet connection and i have a laptop that connects wirelessly. I have an external hard drive connected via the usb on my Airport. I installed my airport disk utility software on my desktop as it is the computer i store all my itunes material on and it syncs to my ATV. I am able to see my external hard drive as a networked drive on my desktop, and it works fine. However i am not able to see the networked drive on my laptop. I am running Norton 360 on both machines and both machines are running Windows Vista.
Do I have to install the Airport Disk Utility on both machines? I have read thru lots of threads about this and have not been able to solve this problem. I have gone into my firewall settings and allowed file sharing on my laptop. I cannot think of anything else to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is the main reason I purchased my Airport Extreme.

I have exactly the same set-up, but I can see the portable drive with my MacBookPro but not with the PC connected by an ethernet cable to the Airport Extreme. How did you get the PC to see the portable drive on the Airport?

External hard drive connected to airport extreme is not recognized (Lion)

Plugged an external hard drive into the USB port on my new Airport Extreme Base Station, and it's nowhere to be found on my MB Pro (Lion). Doesn't appear in "Finder" or anywhere else.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
TIA

The drive also needs to be formatted right (NTFS and ExFAT don't work). See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2426
If the drive is bus-powered (ie, doesn't have its own power supply), you need a powered USB hub, as the Airport's USB port is underpowered. Some folks have also needed them with some large (750 GB or more) powered drives, too.

I want to use external hard drive connected to airport extreme that contains iTunes library to airplay library to apple tv

I have a macbook 4.1 with 4gb ram running lion. I have a 3 tb external drive that i use for time machine bakcups and a partition for my itunes library. When I want to watch a movie I connect the external hard drive to my macbook, open itunes and airplay it to my apple tv. However, this solution is not optimal because I lose the use of my macbook when it has to be connected via usb to my hard drive.
What I want to do is be able to watch a movie on my apple tv via my external hard drive wirelessly.
I realize that hooking up an airport extreme to a harddrive for time capsule purposes is not supported and thats fine.
However, will this work for the purpose of airplaying itunes library to apple tv.
Also would this work with most other wireless routers that support external hard drives? Not asking for specifics here, because i know no one can know every device. But is there any technical problem that would prevent it.
Thanks

Yea I'm just going to wait for a solution I like better. The easiest way would be for apple to have some kind of itunes server software. Theres no reason that my computer running itunes shouldn't be able to communicate with with hard drive wirelessly just as it would with a usb cable. Kind of like wireless itunes synching with my iphone.
I don't want to use Itunes match because music is not my concern. It is the 1,000 movies that I want to watch on apple tv without tying up my laptop.
Thanks anyway

Can Time Machine back up a external hard drive connected to Airport Extreme

I recently purchased a new macbook pro, and airport extreme.
I attached a 750 GB external hard drive to the macbook pro, and reformatted it so time machine made the initial back up and hourly back ups from there.
Is it possible to now to unattach the external hard drive and attach it to the airport extreme, where the mac book time machine will back up to the external hard drive through airport extreme?
i have seen conflicting posts is if this is possible.

That would probably be safest.
Note that Apple's position on this got even more negative with Snow Leopard: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
It does work well for some folks, not so well for some, and not at all for others.
I got a refurb dual-band model in September. It worked well for about 3 months, but lately I get the error 109 and corrupted backups every few days, that Disk Utility can't fix. Once, Disk Warrior could, but since then, if they're corrupted, nothing helps. That's on a year-old Seagate drive that seems fine otherwise, especially when connected directly.
And I have an excellent wireless connection; it's only about 10 feet from my Mac, speeds are great, S/N ratio is good, etc.
It makes no sense to me that a TC would work better, but they seem to.

Access external hard drive connected to Airport Extreme USB via Windows & Mac

I have an Airport Extreme and I would like to connect an external hard drive to it via USB so that I can backup pictures, music, documents etc. I need to be able to see the external hard drive from my windows PC. I eventually will be buying a Mac so I would like to be able to also get to my pictures and documents via the MAC as well.
I currenlty have an iPhone, iPad and Apple TV so getting to the external drive from these devices would be a huge bonus also if that is possible.
I recently bought an ioSafe Solo External Hard Drive and I had to return it because it was only formatted for the PC. When I plugged it into my Airport Extreme, I could see the drive via the Airport Disk Utility but I could not see it from my PC and I could not map a drive to it. When I contacted ioSafe support, they said that what I was trying to do was not possible since I did not have a MAC available to me to reformat the drive.
I hope that I am not trying to accomplish the impossible because I will always need to live in a MAC/PC world.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time!

You must know people with Macs.. it is 2min work to plug a USB drive into a Mac Laptop and format it Mac OS extended with a quick format.. And that is better IMHO than buying a utility or buying a pre-formatted drive which are often more expensive for no very good or obvious reason.
Another option is a Linux boot disk.. Linux distributions have very similar command line tools to the Mac OS. (some are identical) and HFS+ has been available for ages in Linux.

What is the best way to manage itunes content using an external hard drive connected to airport extreme?

Just a little history on what I've already tried. I have my itunes folder on my external hard drive with an alias linking to my macbook pro. My hard drive is networked from airport extreme. Streaming content is not a problem. Syncing my iphone is the problem. I just get the pinwheel and a message stating sync unsuccessful because itunes was unable to connect. It takes a very long time to change any settings in itunes for mu phone.I have 8g of ram so that shouldn't be a problem. Any help would be appricated.

The best solution would be two different types of backups, one local (in your own home) and one elsewhere. So, option 3 is the "best" solution.
I, personally, use Crashplan to backup all of my computers because it's much more convenient than an external hard drive.
With an external hard drive, you can either use Time Machine to create the historical/incremental backups OR you can create a bootable clone periodically using SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.
I don't know of any way to make the machines mirror images of one another - as far as I know, the best you could do is transfer data from one to the other at time of purchase and then use something like DropBox to keep files in sync.
~Lyssa

External hard drive connected to airport extreme.

I have a seagate 4tb backup plus external drive and want to connect it to the airport extreme. will this let me use time machine and backup on the external drive as well as backing up on windows? i can create a partition on the drive if that is needed.

Unless things have changed very recently, the AirPorts will not support a drive larger than 3TB if you are planning to connect the drive to the USB port on the AirPort.
If you already have a 4TB drive, it won't hurt to try to connect it to the USB port on the AirPort Extreme....you never know....a recent "hidden" update might allow larger drives.
Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme are not officially supported by Apple. However, some users seem to be able to make this work, some users have some problems when they try this, and others....like me...have nothing but problems when they try this.
If you decide to try it, it would be good idea to have a secondary backup plan in place if your data is important to you.
The Time Machine partition of the drive would need to be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Sorry, can't help on the Windows question, but maybe another user can advise.

WD External Hard Drive Connected to Airport Extreme

Hi!
Is it possible to connect my WD SE Passport Essential to the Airport Extreme? I want to back up my Imac and my MBP at the same time without connecting the WD-HD bak and forth to both machines.
I tried using a highs speed USB port (D-Link) and connect it to the AE but the WD-HD does not appear on my iMac and MBP but the printer (connected to the AE thru the D-Link) works.
Thanks.

Are you planning to use Time Machine for the backups? If so, you need to know that backing-up that way is "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See [Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Airport.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
A better alternative would be to connect an external HD to your iMac, and back it up directly to one partition. Back the MBP up to a separate partition, via "sharing," over your network. See #22 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum), for setup instructions.

Mac only sees part of external hard drive connected through airport extreme

I partitioned the Lacie 500gb external drive into a FAT32 portion, and a larger portion for Mac, per instructions so I can use by both Mac and PC. Mac is supposed to 'see' both partitions, but only sees the larger one. If i go through Airport Utility, manual setup, disks..then it does show both partitions. But the smaller partition does not show up on the desktop or in Finder, so I am unable to access it.
I need the smaller portion to show as well since that is the portion I will use with PC and to share files between PC and Mac. I researched 'mounting' the drive, but nothing there.
Thanks to anyone who can help...
John

Not supported by Apple, may or may not work, & if it does work may unexpectedly stop working. Read more here:
http://pondini.org/TM/Airport.html

I am attempting to connect an external hard drive to my airport extreme and see this hard drive under time machine preferences. I used to able to do this under Leopard, but no longer under lion, even after downloading Airport utility 5.6.

Hi, I am attempting to see my extrenal hard drive, connected to my airport extreme base station, in time machine. I formatted the disk, backed up my mackbook pro to it via usb, and now want to be able to backup over wifi with my disk connected to my airport extreme base station. I spoke with Apple Care, and they told me Apple doens't support this. I used to be able to do this with my older MB pro and under older osx's. I do see the external hard drive connected under disks, just not in time machine preferences. Is there a workaround available that anyone is aware of?
Thank you so much,
Tabeer

HT204057 Time machine back up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme? It worked very well.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme?
Time Machine backups are supported via USB hard drive connected to the AirPort Extreme"ac" version.
Time Machine backups were not supported via USB hard drive connected to earlier versions of the AirPort Extreme.
Some users who tried this on earlier version AirPort Extremes seemed to have some success with Time Machine backups....some had moderate success and some had no success with this. Count me in the "no success" category.
See the topic about Time Machine support for USB disks in this Apple Support document:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5924?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

External hard drive connected to Airport Extreme not working on PC

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