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Using Airport Extreme with Seagate FreeAgent Drive

I am a brand new Apple user. Finally ditched the pc and the dark side of the Force! I am trying to figure out how to connect my Seagate FreeAgent drive to the Airport Extreme. I used a firewire on the pc but what cable do I need with the Airport Extreme's ethernet connections or can I even do that? I am using the USB port on the Extreme for the printer. Please be kind to an Apple virgin and a guy who is computer illiterate.

MacBook Pro, Airport Extreme

Posted on Apr 28, 2010 7:28 PM

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7 replies

Apr 28, 2010 8:34 PM in response to mrdrysdale64

Welcome to the discussion area!

If the Seagate drive has an ethernet port, then it would be possible to connect it to one of the LAN <-> ports on the AirPort Extreme.

If the Seagate drive has a USB connection, you could add a powered hub to the AirPort Extreme to support both the drive and your printer.

If you want to continue to use a Firewire connection, the drive will need to be connected directly to your Mac.

Apr 29, 2010 6:48 PM in response to mrdrysdale64

Thanks for the info. Let's check a few items.

On your MacBook, click anywhere on the open desktop so that the Finder menus appear at the top of the screen.
Click Finder, then click Preferences, then the General tab
Under the heading of "show these items on the desktop", make sure there is a check mark next to "connected servers"
Close the Finder Preferences window

Open Macintosh HD and look for your AirPort Extreme icon under the SHARED heading on the left side of the window. Is it there? If so,
Click on the AirPort Extreme icon and a folder will appear in the window just to the right.
The folder should be your drive. You can double click to open, drag/drop or copy paste into this window

Everything here assumes that your drive is formatted for Mac or is a FAT32 format. If the drive is formatted for Windows only (NFTS), I don't think that you will be able to use it at the AirPort Extreme.

Please post back on your progress.

May 15, 2010 8:11 PM in response to mrdrysdale64

The MacBook will need to have the Time Machine application installed. If it does, make sure the MacBook is connected to the AirPort Extreme either by wireless or ethernet cable, click System Preferences on the MacBook (gear icon on the dock) and the open Time Machine to setup that computer.

You may need to follow the same procedure to get the Mac to appear under the SHARED heading on the MacBook.

Finally, you need to understand that Time Machine backups to a drive attached to the AirPort Extreme are not officially supported by Apple, so your results cannot be predicted. Some users are able to get this to work. Some have been able to get it to work some of the time and some cannot get it to work at all.

Jul 11, 2010 8:28 AM in response to mrdrysdale64

I have been using a Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1.5 Tb drive with my MacBook for half a year already. When I bought the drive, I formatted it into HFS+ for better compatibility and have been happy ever since…

Until I bought an Airport Extreme this evening. The ONLY reason I went for the Extreme base station was its USB port which (unlike its little "Express" brother) was capable of sharing a hard drive.
So what am I seeing? — The base station totally refuses to work with the drive constantly repeating "disk needs repair". I have of course gone through the "repair" process using the Disk Utility, and it gives out a perfect green "the disk is OK". And, I repeat, the drive has only one partition that has been formatted into HFS+.

And the most verbose log that the base station is able to produce is...
My base station:
Jul 12 00:06:39 Severity:5 Disk sd0 (Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 4115) plugged in.
Jul 12 00:06:39 Severity:4 Volume dk0 on Disk sd0 (Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 4115) needs repair (256).
Jul 12 00:06:39 Severity:4 Volume dk0 on Disk sd0 (Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 4115) failed to mount (256).


Most of the people reporting the same problem had their drives formatted in whatever else, but not HFS+. I am sure my drive is supposed to work smoothly. They are even called similarly: XTreme hdd and Extreme base station (%

Does anyone have a clue what could be wrong here?
Thank you in advance for your expertise.

Using Airport Extreme with Seagate FreeAgent Drive

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