Airport Extreme and External USB Hard Drive

I've got an Airport Extreme (not the dual band model) running 7.4.2 and Airport Utility running 5.4.2. Trying to use it with an external hard drive I just bought. Formatted the HD for MAC and have made several backups with the HD connected directly to the Macbook (running 10.6.2). Airport Utility will not recognize the HD under "Disk" tab. Sharing is set on, and when I plug in a regular old flash drive it works perfectly. Just wont pull up the External Hard Drive.

I've hit almost the same problem. Upgraded the external USB drive to a new 2TB model: it works perfectly with the computer, but the Airport Extreme flashes its orange warning light and reports a 'problem with the external hard drive', recommends attaching it to the computer for repair. Drive checks out fine again when it's connected to the computer. Does the Airport Extreme support 2TB? Would it work if I partitioned the drive?

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AirPort Extreme and shared USB Hard Drive

I received an AirPort Extreme for Christmas with the intent of using it to share a network Hard Drive and Printer between the multiple machines on our home network. I've finally gotten it set up with Bonjour on the PC's, and the AirPort Utility on all machines. It's connected via ethernet cable to a Dell PC, and wirelessly to an iMac, a Dell Laptop, my iPhone and a PS3. Internet functionality is great for all devices.
My next step was to connect a Seagate 750GB External USB Hard Drive to the APE. This drive was previously connected to the Dell PC, and was formatted as NTFS. I went through the hassle of converting it to FAT32, I connected it to the router, and both Dell's and the iMac can see the drive. I haven't checked if the PS3 can see it yet, but since I haven't found Bonjour for the PS3, I'm not holding my breath. The iPhone - well, mine isn't jailbroken at the moment.
A few quick hints I learned from doing a lot of web surfing and trial-and-error. These could save people a LOT of time...
+ Don't format a external drive as either an Apple Drive (HFS+) or as a Windows Drive (NTFS) if you plan on using data off it on both a Mac and a PC. Windows won't read HFS+ without a converter, APE won't accept NTFS. It needs to be FAT32 as this is nearly universal.
+ Windows will only format a maximum of 32GB as FAT32. It's a stupid limit, and you have to jump hoops to get it to do a larger drive size.
+ Use the Disk Utility on the Mac to erase the drive and reformat it as an MS-DOS partition. It will work up to a drive of about 2TB according to what I've read. On the Mac, MS-DOS partition = FAT32, and it formatted my 750GB drive as a single 750GB partition.
Now, I've begun the task of copying all our media to the drive. Copied a few pictures, no problem. Copied a few MP3's, no problem. Where the problems start is in trying to copy movies to the drive. We have ripped most of our DVD's to DivX / H.264, to keep the kids from destroying the DVD's (trust me, DVD's scratch EASY in the hands of a 5-year old). So I have about 50 movies to transfer, each around 1GB in size.
Each time I try to transfer a movie to the drive, I get an error "*Error Copying File or Folder*" which displays the message "*Cannot copy BlahBlahBlah: The specified network name is no longer available.*" This also results in the HDD becoming unavailable to the other machines on the network. I've had to un-plug and then re-plug the APE a few times to get the HDD to work again. Sometimes, the copy actually does work, even though I get this message. I know the easy work-around is to connect the HDD directly to the PC with the files on it and transfer them that way, but I shouldn't have to do that - it should just work.
I'm wondering if anyone else has any kind of a similar experience? It appears that I can stream music and video from the drive easily enough, it's the writing to the drive that seems to be the issue. Thanks in advance...
Best Regards,
Jeff

I would think you would have better luck formatting it as HFS+ (Macintosh Extended File System). You'll still be able to see it from your non-Mac PCs.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6370006#6370006

Can Time Capsule backup an Airport Extreme's attached USB hard drive?

Can Time Capsule backup an Airport Extreme's attached USB hard drive (without currently being attached to a MAC OSX LION system)?

No, sorry.. there is no way for the TC to see the files.. and even if you plug the hard disk into the TC there is no mechanism in the TC to drag the files to itself.. The TC is absolutely a dumb network attached drive.. everything you want to do must be done from a computer.

Airport Extreme and connecting a hard drive

Hello All,
Thank you ahead of time for your help! I have a couple of questions regarding the set up of my airport extreme and an external hard drive.
What I want to accomplish is using the airport extreme to ONLY share a hard drive for backup and sharing other files through out the house. My housemates already have the internet going through their router, so there is for the airport extreme. Can a macbook pro (13in intel) receive two wireless signals, one that is the internet and the other from my airport extreme (that shares my hard drive)? If so, how is this done?
Any assistance would be more that appreciated!!
Thanks!!

Hello njoza. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
The simplest way to accomplish this would be to connect the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) to the Internet router by Ethernet; reconfigure the AEBSn as a bridge, and disable its wireless radios.
In this configuration, you can still share out the hard drive and only need to connect to the Internet router's wireless network for both drive & Internet access.

Why won't my new Airport Extreme recognize my USB Hard drive? My MacBook recognizes it. I already have had a great deal of trouble connecting my printer to print wirelessly, but finally resolved that. Now I want to add the external drive with a USB por

Why won't my new Airport Extreme recognize my USB external hard drive. I put a USB port on the base station, and the system recognizes my printer. When I click on disks - it lists my printer, and when I click on Printers it lists my printer. What do I need to do to get it to recognize the external drive? BTW, the MacBook recognizes it, no problem. I have erased it and reformatted it. I am running the new Lion OS. Any help is appreciated.

Yes, I saw a post on one of these threads about a powered USB hub so I ran over to Office Depot and picked one up. I was finally able to see the HD in the Airport Utility. Yay!

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

Airport Extreme and External USB HDD

I've seen quite a few posts on the topic but no real fixes. I have a 21.5" iMac utilizing an dual-band Airport Extreme Base Statation for networking. I also have a 1TB Toshiba USB external hard drive. Formatted for Mac OS journaled. I plug the drive into the iMac and, after displaying "this drive is not recognized by the Mac" message, it mounts and recognizes the drive and allows me to perform a time machine backup. After awhile the drive disappears and will not show up again until it is power cycled. Annoying enough...but it gets worse.
I tried to plug the hard drive into the AEBS to allow it to be used by others in the household...it shows up in the Airport Utility, I can name it, it shows up in Finder, but when I actually try to use it....nothing. Nothing will transfer to it.
HELP! Anyone have any ideas on this. It's been maddeningly frustrating and I actually put the problem aside for the last six months becasue I couldn't get it to work reliabily. But, I paid money for the HD and I'd like to use it for something.

Welcome to the discussions!
I've seen quite a few posts on the topic but no real fixes.
Unfortunately, there really are no fixes. The answer for your issue is that Apple has not ever supported Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme. You might want to refer to the Apple support documents below concerning this.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2038
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
If you want to use Time Machine for backups, you'll need to connect the drive directly to your computer.

Airport Extreme with a USB Hard Drive to a store all iTunes music

Can you plug in a USB external Hard Drive to a Airport Extreme to store all iTunes music (or other files) and then access this from all wireless devices?

Yeah the backup is where I'm getting stuck. Seems just keeping the files on my local hard drive is the easiest but that would essentially require a new computer as I'm running a 2008 Macbook Pro and don't want to upgrade it.

Time machine iMac HD and external USB hard drive backs up to separate locations

I have an iMac 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 with 2TB HD backing up to a 5th gen 2 TB Time Capsule via Time Machine. I also have a 2TB USB external Seagate HD connected to my iMac (which contains lots of iMovies and stuff I don't have room for on my iMac) and a 2nd 2TB USB external Seagate HD connected to the USB port of the Time Capsule. I want Time Machine to alternate backing up my iMac (with the 2TB USB ext HD with iMovies etc excluded) to the Time Capsule and then backing up the USB external HD connected to the iMac (with the iMac HD excluded) to the 2TB ext HD connected to the Time Capsule. I know Time Machine can back up a single HD to 2 different back up drives alternately and it can back up multiple drives to a single back up drive. But I want it to do alternate backups of the iMac and the ext HD to two different locations. Is this possible?

Sorry no.. but there are far superior backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner to do the job..
Superduper is also popular and there are some others. Time Machine is singularly without controls.. a typical apple software really.

Rescue and Recovery 4.3 on Win7 doesn't see a backup on external USB hard drive - Model W510

I've run the Rescue and Recovery utility within Windows 7 on two different external USB hard drives thinking that maybe it was a usb drive issue. When I open the R And R utility in expert mode I can see that both backups exist on their respective drives. I planned on updating my hard drive so I made a full hd backup and the R&R startup disc to boot the laptop from. The bios recognizes either external hard drive at boot with no problems. It shows the names and "+" sign next to drives. So I booted the drive at startup off the DVD drive with the R&R startup disc after I was sure that the bios recognized either external drives. Then when I choose a "Full" restore is of course asks me if I want to use hd, cd/dvd, or external usb drive which I choose the later. It then should show me the backup that I created earlier just as it did when I ran the utility from the Win7 environment so I can choose it to restore from. But I get a blank box showing no backups when I run the 4.3 R&R Startup disc. Again if I boot to Win7 and go into the R&R utility I can see the backup on the exact same USB external drive. Then boot off the CD startup recovery disc and it shows NO BACKUP! Help please! I want to shelf my old hard drive "as is" and create the Restore onto the new hard drive but the utility isn't working for me.
Thanks for any help.

Hmmm,
Seems like that _should_ work. Here's a way you might be able to finesse it: go to the advanced R&R menu in Win 7 and create rescue media on your USB drive. It's essentially the same process as creating the CD - it makes the USB drive bootable and puts a copy of R&R there.
There _should_ be an option to "preserve existing data" but be prepared to lose your existing backup and make it again.
Then just boot the external USB drive and see if R&R recognizes a backup image on the same drive from which you booted.
That's the way I usually migrate to new drives. Maybe it will get around your mysterious problem.
Z.
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I put my macbook to sleep and unplugged my external USB hard drive, now It

does not show up on the desktop and can not be verified in Disk Utility. This is my first mac but have been running linux for a while now. Any help would be appreciated.

rustytiger wrote:
I put my macbook to sleep and unplugged my external USB hard drive, now it
does not show up on the desktop and can not be verified in Disk Utility. This is my first mac but have been running linux for a while now. Any help would be appreciated.
Well I hate to ask the silly question here but... did you plug the external hard drive back in?

External USB hard drives working very slow and/or not recognized. Help!

This probably started after my Yosemite upgrade, but my external usb hard drives either aren't working well or not being recognized. It's taking forever to write files to my external Seagate Free Agent USB 2.0 through front ports and my thumb drives aren't mounting (they have shown up for a second or two, then nothing). Is there a fix? I'm on an early 2008 mac pro with Yosemite 10.10.2.
Thanks!

Do an SMC reset using this slightly-modified procedure:
Resetting the SMC for Mac Pro, Intel-based iMac, Intel-based Mac mini, or Intel-based Xserve
1.Shut down the computer.
2. Unplug the computer's power cord.
[2a. Press the power-on button to discharge the power capacitors.]
3. Wait fifteen seconds.
4. Attach the computer's power cord.
5. Wait five seconds, then press the power button to turn on the computer.
in all cases, the stated times are recommended minimums, and there are no maximums.
Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) - Apple Support

External USB Hard Drive not showing up on Time Capsule

Hi all,
I have a 500 Gb Time Capsule that used to be able to detect my external USB hard drives. I had to store my things for a while and have just started using the Time Capsule again. The TC works fine, however, the same USB external hard drives I used to connect to the TC are not showing up anymore :s They show up on the desktop when I connect them directly to my MacBook via USB. I have been through most of the file sharing options in Airport Utility and System Preferences but have not been able to solve this. I can't think of any settings that would have changed from when they were showing up in the past. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thx

yosemite won't work with ntfs drives for some reason, i've had the same issue with my toshiba. i thought ok lemme buy another one, and transfer it over maybe it's a driver issue which i've tried over and over, apple support can't figure it out.
here's a simple fix, but the problem is i have an external where all my photography and video files are stored, so i can't access them right now and it's making my life ****.
http://guides.macrumors.com/Formatting_an_External_Device
that does work and make the drive mountable now, but problem being i can't obviously reformat the old drive and lose everything. once the new drive is formatted for mac i can't plug it into a pc to transfer the files from. which is the only problem now. but formatting the drive for mac only DOES work. but you're just screwed and not able to use it ntfs. hope the link helps SOME people.

Is it possible to use time capsule or airport extreme as a wireless hard drive for iphone?

Is it possible to use time capsule or airport extreme as a wireless hard drive for iphone.
I would like to strem movies from the hard drive to iphone.
I have already seen the Goflex Stellite, which works this way.
Is there any other device that could do this?

I did a typo. My current computer is a 2010 1/2 iMac. The stand alone monitors are still out of my price range so I'm looking for other options. By buying an external hard drive and a broken iMac, I'm still ahead. Still, if I understand you right, the 27" 2010 and earlier iMacs would be possiblities.
Are there adapters that would allow me to run a 2011 and newer iMac as an external monitor from my 2010 1/2. There are so many adapters out there these days.

Regarding the product time capsule...is the modem the same as airport extreme and is the disk drive always running? I'm worried about it lasting for at least five years.

Regarding the product Time Capsule... is the modem the same as the Airport extreme and is the disk drive always running??? I'm worried about it lasting at least five years.

John,
I'd pay good money to bet it wouldn't last 5 years... I don't rate the in built power supply and as for "server grade hard disk" - Hmmmm..... The failure rate of all HD's on the market after 3 year is 60%.
Regards,
Shawn

Airport Extreme and External USB Hard Drive

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