Can't Find the external Hard Drive on the Extreme Airport

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Can't Find the external Hard Drive on the Extreme Airport

I've been having lots of problems. I reformatted a new hard drive by plugging it directly into my mac, then I hooked it up to the AP extreme. It doens't pop up on my desktop. I used the airport utility to set it up to allow an external hard drive, but still nothing. What am I doing wrong?? I'm using a 500gb external seagate drive in an enclosure. It does show that the hard drive is there in the airport utility(shows the volume!?!)

thanks,

-Doug

iMac20 intel duo Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Mar 10, 2007 7:10 AM

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Answer 1

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Anonymous

Level 2

430 points

Mar 10, 2007 9:32 AM in response to darkduc

Doug,

Knowledge base article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AirPortUtility/5.0/en/ap2108.html might yield more information regarding your situation. Otherwise, have you tried enabling the option to automatically mount the volume found within the Airport Disk Utility application found within the Utilities folder?

Regards,
Chris

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Answer 2

Mar 10, 2007 1:12 PM in response to darkduc

After reformatting did you by chance add any files while directly connected to your mac/pc.

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Answer 3

Mar 10, 2007 1:52 PM in response to darkduc

I have the same problem. As far as I can tell Airport can only work with Fat32 format drives. So I went to reformat my 240MB drive using XP only to find that XP can only support up to 32MB drives with Fat32. Am in the process of creating 32MB partition drives in Fat32 and will see what happens. But another problem is that XP only supports 4 partitions per physical drive, so at most I will be able to use 128MB of my 240MB drive. This appears to be a serious flaw with Airport -- I don't want four separate drives and don't want half my drive unusable. Any ideas anyone?

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Answer 4

Anonymous

Level 2

430 points

Mar 10, 2007 1:56 PM in response to Rogue Chia

Rogue Chia,

The Airport Extreme (802.11n) base station supports various file formats - you may find knowledge base article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305038 helpful in discussing this in more detail.

Regards,
Chris

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Answer 5

Mar 10, 2007 2:02 PM in response to Anonymous

According to this article Airport won't even work with the four partitions I am now making because it only recognizes drives with a single partition. Great. This is then a defective product really. I will have to return it. This is pretty disappointing -- Airport is no better at drive sharing than a lot of other products on the market for pC users (and probably worse). Disappointing from Apple.

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Answer 6

darkduc Author

Level 1

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Mar 10, 2007 2:19 PM in response to Anonymous

Awesome. My problem was first I did not even reformat drive. Then I reformatted in UNIX, don't ask why, I'm stupid. I thought if I was to access wirelessly from a mac and a PC perhaps unix would be a reasonable choice...

Reformatted the drive under ""Mac OS Extended Journaled" setting with 1 partition. Now I have an extra 500 gigs to use for my back up. Now I will see if I can get my raid 1 system going that I always wanted...

iMac20 intel duo Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Answer 7

Anonymous

Level 2

430 points

Mar 10, 2007 3:08 PM in response to Rogue Chia

Rogue Chia,

You had indicated that were partitioning the drive in order to accomodate all the drive space. Have you tried formatting the drive, if possible, from a Mac as HFS+ Journaled?

Regards,
Chris

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Answer 8

Mar 10, 2007 3:22 PM in response to Anonymous

Don't know anyone around with a Mac, so no.

I just got off the phone with Apple support and they are taking back my Airport. Apparently this is a known problem PC users will face and Apple has no answer.

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