Can't view and access files on a NAS

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Can't view and access files on a NAS

I have a home network with 1 new iMac, new MacBook Pro and 3 year old MacBook. I have a bunch of music files on a Netgear NAS. I am having problems viewing the files and folders on the NAS, but the problems are different for each of my machines:

1 When I go to view the files on the NAS in the finder in the new iMac, I just see the swirly thing in the finder and the folders and files never appear in the window.

2 When I view on the new MacBook, I can sometimes see the folders, but the files never appear.

3 When I try to view the files on my old MacBook, I sometimes see the files.

4 My NAS is accessed by Sonos and iTunes and generally I have no problems even if I can't see files in the finder. But sometimes I have problems accessing files (i.e. I have had occasions when entire albums or entire song inventories of a particular artist are gone, only to magically and unpredictably appear a week later).

This has been constant experience for the months so isn't a once-in-time anomaly. So net, the newer, the more expensive the machine, the less I get to access my NAS files. Obviously something is wrong.

What's going on and how do I resolve?

Thanks everyone.

imac, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 12, 2009 9:03 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

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Aug 12, 2009 9:28 PM in response to sfmacuser

Contact NetGear - it's their product.

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Answer 2

sfmacuser Author

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Aug 12, 2009 9:34 PM in response to Kappy

I have and will (again). The folks in the Nethear forums and their technical support, say "contact Apple" because it works fine with my one PC, and it worked fine with my old iMac (just not my new iMacs and my MacBook since I downloaded some Leopard updates....). So who should help me?

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Answer 3

Kappy

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362,007 points

Aug 12, 2009 9:42 PM in response to sfmacuser

Until you can verify it isn't a problem with the NAS you should deal with NetGear. Their NAS' are intended and designed for use on PCs, not Macs. Since the NAS is unlikely to use Apple File System protocols or any Mac OS, then getting it to work on a Mac is essentially like file sharing with a Windows or Linux computer depending upon which OS it uses.

Perhaps you should start by starting over with connecting to it as Leopard's file sharing is a bit different from Tigers. But your first test would be to connect it to a Windows PC to see if it works properly.

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Answer 4

Sep 7, 2009 7:04 AM in response to sfmacuser

I've got the exact same problem using a Western Digital My Book World. I can get to the thing through XP, but not through OS X or Ubuntu. It looks to me like the NFS daemon is toasted, as the drive worked fine for about 45 days.

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Answer 5

Sep 7, 2009 7:09 AM in response to John Herreshoff

And by NFS, I really meant AFP. Sorry, kind of early for me.

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Answer 6

Sep 7, 2009 7:39 AM in response to John Herreshoff

Ok I've got a little bit more for this, and sorry it's ending up in this thread that's a little bit old, but it seems to be applicable to what's happening on my machine.

So I updated from 10.5.7 to 10.5.8 and it made no difference. Finder was actually crashing on startup attempting to connect to this drive, and I had to turn off airport to get the thing to time out just to get the operating system going. If I turn off AFP on the drive, it obviously disappears. If I enable it, then I can see the drive, but can't connect to it.

At the same time, I can access the administration controls via the web interface, I can SSH into it and I can access my iTunes library on the drive. Additionally, I can connect via WIndows XP.

Ideas?

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Answer 7

mcbainia

Level 1

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Sep 11, 2009 3:30 AM in response to John Herreshoff

Hello there folks.

I too am having a problem accessing my NAS files. I am using a WD Mybook World Edition 1TB and using SL 10.6. I think (although not too sure) that my problems started when I installed Itunes 9.

I can see my server in the 'Shared' section of Finder and but when I try to connect to it I cannot see the shared folders. Itunes can still see all the shared music on the NAS and I can still access it via Safari (the admin pages) but Finder cannot see anything on the drive.

I have updated the Firmware for the NAS and after doinf this, the only change was that I can now see 2 entries in my 'Shared' section in finder - both the same name but the second one having '-Back-Up' after the name. still no access to the shares.

Can anyone help ? I've had a trawl through some forums but this thread has been the closest I could find to my problem.

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