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weasel82

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 11, 2008
5
0
Hey all,

I'm hoping for some help regarding the topic in the subject line. I purchased a new Airport Extreme and am using a Seagate Backup Plus 3TB external HD as a backup drive and media drive. I want to share this drive over the network, but it doesn't seem to appear in my airport utility. I had assumed, by Apple's directions, you just connect it to the airport extreme and it appears ready to be shared in the utility.

The only naivity that I might have is that currently the ae is being used as a signal extender, as opposed to be directly connected to my cable modem.

Any thoughts on the problem?
 

davidryal

macrumors newbie
Jan 17, 2013
1
0
working on the same problem today, with the same 3gb seagate backup drive.

I also wanted to share a printer on the network, so I plugged a USB hub into it and put both the printer and the Seagate into it.

Printer worked, Seagate didn't, same as you.

The fix for me, which is probably your problem too, is that the Airport Extreme will only recognize disks formatted using OSX Journaled (HFS+ filesystem). And your (and my) Seagate came formatted with something more generic, like NTFS

So, plug the Seagate directly into your Mac and use the Disk Utility to 'Erase' it with the Mac filesystem and then plug it back into the AE usb port.

If you want to test to make sure this is gonna work, you can also try the process with a USB key. Once a working drive is plugged in, it should show up immediately on any Mac's or PC's as a shared drive.

Hope this helps!
 
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