My Airport Extreme Can't See My USB Disk

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Level 1

10 points

My Airport Extreme Can't See My USB Disk

Hi. I have a new airport extreme out of the box, factory fresh. I plugged in my USB hard drive and cannot see it displayed in the Airport Utility under Disks. I have tried different hard drives, different cables, rebooted the airport, restored it to default settings but still no joy.

The first disk I tried was a factory fresh Buffalo formatted to NTFS. Then I tried my USB disk that was the Time Machine backup on my old Mac that I had connected via a USB cable. Neither can be seen.

At my wits end....

Thanks for any help

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Dec 5, 2012 11:22 AM

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Answer 1

DukeWybourne Author

Level 1

10 points

Dec 5, 2012 11:27 AM in response to DukeWybourne

Interesting. My media disk can be seen by it, so clearly the other two disks weren't in a format that it liked... I shall use this information to move forwards, but at least I haven't done something wrong!

The media disk is HFS+

Cheers

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Answer 2

Dec 5, 2012 11:36 AM in response to DukeWybourne

The drive must be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or FAT32 to be recognized at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme.

The USB port on the AirPort Extreme is underpowered. For that reason, it is often necessary to use a powered USB hub with a hard drive......even if the hard drive has its own power supply.

If the drive is formatted correctly, and you have a powered USB hub, and the drive will still not appear in AirPort Utility, then it is time to take the AirPort Extreme to an Apple Store or service to have the USB port checked out.

See this discussion for more information and tips:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4450239?answerId=20499058022#20499058022

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