It appears I'm going to need to reformat it FAT32 or HFS+. What's the best choice here? Will the Windows PCs see a network drive formatted HFS+?
Yes,, use HFS+ .. FAT32 is old and poor. windows will treat it as an NT server.. although you can still have 4GB file limits.
I must add though.. the best place for the USB drive is plugged into the PC direct. Share to the network if you need PC to talk to it.. The USB drive will be much faster .. and if USB 3 incredibly much faster.. the TC is only USB 2.
Second, how do I map the network drive in the TC to Windows 7 and 8? What is the network path to this drive?
Strongly recommend you install the airport utility for windows.
AirPort Utility 5.6.1 for Windows
It will install in win8 with a bit of kicking if it doesn't go in first time.. use safe mode.
That installs some important extras.. bonjour for windows.. which helps windows find apple network resources.. and a disk agent that should bring up an icon for the hard disk in the explorer..
If that fails just type in.
\\TCname\sharename
Where TCname is the actual network name of the TC..
And this is 1000% harder if you setup the TC with Apple recommended names.. ie
Fred Blog's Airport Time Capsule (the name is over long, has spaces and illegal character).
For windows.. stick to all names and all passwords that are short, no spaces and pure alphanumeric.
eg TC Base Station name = TCgen5
Wireless name = TCwifi
Network names.. <10 characters gets you bonus brownie points.
Passwords 8-20 characters mixed case and numbers.
If you really like apple long names.. then use IP address, eg \\10.0.1.1\sharename in the address bar.. instead of the TC name which is not its network name anyway.
I wish Apple would supply more information about how their products work in a non-Apple environment.
Apple is definitely headed the other way.. Apple has not released a new airport utility for windows so the current one is not even valid for the latest products. They no longer care.
Documentation on the setup of the Airport routers is out of date even on the Mac side of the world.. so windows has no hope.
