Hard drive compatibility problems with Airport Extreme

Yesterday I received and installed Airport Extreme to create a home network where I would have external hard drives connected to the network by USB. Airport Extreme wouldn’t recognize my 1TB Western Digital My Book hard drive and after some investigation I find out that Airport doesn’t recognize HD formatted in NTFS.
So my plan was to move the data off the WD HD on to a spare HDs I have, reformat the the WD HD to a Mac/Airport extreme friendly format and then move the data back on. It’s kind of a pain but not the end of the world. Then as I’m transferring the files between hard drives I get a message that the file is too large to move to the other HD. I read some forums and see that FAT32 partitioned drives can only take file sizes up to 4GBs (I didn’t check the drive format but assume this to be the case). The problem is that some of the video files on the WD (NTFS format) are in excess of that size so I can reformat the extra drive to NTFS to get the files off the WD HD, reformat the WD to be Mac friendly and reformat in FAT32 (or something else) but then I’ll be stuck with the same problem by having the files on the other HD that will be too large to move back to the reformatted WD HD. Any ideas on the best way I can move these files onto a MAC readable/writable format that will support file sizes in excess of 4 GBs and be recognized by Airport Extreme? Is there a way that I can cut the files down to get them under 4 GBs? Any help is much appreciated.

Steve70 wrote:
I should be able to format the 2nd drive back to FAT32 so it can communicate to both the PC and Mac
you could do that, or you could install MacDrive on the winsloth side.
alternatively, you could format the 2nd drive in NTFS and install the _*NTFS 3G*_ driver, which will enable the Mac to write to it (Macs can read NTFS out-of-the-box).
no more 4 GB per file limit
however, i would prefer to have my drives formatted for Mac ...
JGG

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Once you've got your External HD... See here for Using TM...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427

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Reboot the USB drive.. assuming it is powered.. or unplug and replug a self-powered drive.. (you should not use self-powered drives on AE before the latest model.. always use a powered hub).
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Thank you for such a lightning-fast response Niel :-) Can I just double check with you the following ...?
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Michaelgfrommet

For what it's worth, you posted this in 2011, and here in 2014 I am still having this same issue. Over the last two days, I have had to unlock my apple account 8 times. I didn't get any new devices. I haven't initiated a password reset. I didn't forget my password. I set up two factor authentication and have been able to do the unlocking with the key and using a code sent to one of my devices.
That all works.
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I have initiated an incident with Apple (again) but I know they are just going to suggest I change my Apple ID. It's a simple one, and one that I am sure others think is theirs. I don't want to change it. I shouldn't have to. Apple should be able to tell me who is trying to use it, or at least from where.
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Thanks,

I hope that support is added to the airport extreme. I would be disappointed in apple to learn that they have disabled it for the airport extreme and connected hard drive in order to only sell another piece of hardware (time capsule) that is simply the airport extreme with a hard drive built in.
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Hard drive compatibility problems with Airport Extreme

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