External hard drive stops working with AP Extreme after Time machine touches it

*sigh*
Ok.
I had a 1.5TB external HD connected to my Airport Extreme (henceforth to be known as APE) working fine, albeit with unexpected slow transfer speeds....not the point. Moving along.
Updated to 7.6.1 firmware. Ugh. I wish apple would have their standard idiot mode plus an advanced option.
Getting to the point.
I decide that im going to try Time Machine but there is no way that im going to try doing the inital backup over wireless. I disconnect the external hard drive from the APE and connect to my computer start the backup and decide encryption is a good idea. Turns out, bad idea as it puts some kind of encryption on the whole volume not just an image which i assumed it would do. I decide that this time machine idea is stupid and wonder why the **** its trying to backup 130GB of data after i excluded a lot of data. Anyway. I remove the time machine data, do into disk utility and remove the encryption and plug it back up the the APE.
No dice. The drive will not load at all on the APE and i believe it has something to do with some funky timemachine encryption voodoo. I want to avoid formatting this drive.
So.
Help?

I reformatted and its now working.
*Ugh*

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https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009
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HT3764 How to reformat an external hard drive using Snow Lepard to use for Time Machine

How to reformat an external hard drive using Snow Lepard to use for Time Machine

Use the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to erase it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID as the partition map format(or APM if you're using a PowerPC Mac running 10.5).
(73291)

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Cumby wrote:
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External hard drive stops working with AP Extreme after Time machine touches it

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