Windows 10 map to Airport Extreme USB hard drive

Question

Level 1

32 points

Windows 10 map to Airport Extreme USB hard drive

I have a USB hard drive I would like to use as backup drive for the Windows 10 laptops in the house. Currently, the hard drive is FAT 32 and my iMac recognizes both when it is direct connected and when it is connected to a USB hub attached to my Airport Extreme. My Windows 10 machine recognizes it when attached to the the laptop.

When I connect the HD to the AEBS and try to map to it from the Win10, I cannot see it. I have tried to map to it using "Map Network Drive" in Windows. I have also tried to use Airport Utility on Win10 as well as Mac. Under "Disks" in AU, I do not see any "partitions" from either my attached TM drive or the Fat32 drive. When I go into "Get Info", I can chose "Shared Folder", but I don't really know what to do with that when I enable it in System Preferences. Regardless, even with those selections, I do not see it.

Therefore, the bottom line question is "how do I connect Windows 10 to a USB attached drive on an Airport Extreme?"

Airport Extreme-OTHER

Posted on Oct 3, 2015 7:55 AM

Reply

Answer 1

niru0428

Level 1

4 points

Dec 29, 2015 12:46 AM in response to K J

It sounds silly and not practical however when i formatted my USB drive both partitions to OSX Journal , 2 TB HD 1 for Mac other for Win 10 , Windows 10 detected my 2nd partition, which i had originally tried formatting exFAT / NTFS but didnt work, but now does work as well as seems to back up however i haven't tried to restore anything from there so i doubt if it would even make sense to have a back up there but if you want to manually copy files in there you should be able to with this .

Reply

Answer 2

Dec 29, 2015 5:52 AM in response to K J

"how do I connect Windows 10 to a USB attached drive on an Airport Extreme?"

niru0428 has the answer.

Format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and it will be "seen" by the PC as if it were a FAT32 partition.

Reply

Answer 3

K J Author

Level 1

32 points

Dec 31, 2015 12:08 PM in response to niru0428

That was not the case for me (I had tried that too). Strangely, now one of my Win 10 laptops (the OLDEST one!) sees and can backup to all 3 drives I have attached to a USB hub hung off of the Airport Extreme which itself is hung off (via Ethernet cable) to my wireless access point to my FIOS router. It is a totally kluge/mess, but now somehow works. The other 2 Win 10 laptops see something is there, but don't see any of them as drives (even the Mac OS extended). I am going to keep poking, but I do not think I will be able to replicate/document what I did when I get lucky :-/

Reply