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AEBS + USB HDD Issues - Driving me nuts!

S

Spliff

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 25, 2007
183
0
Vancouver, Canada
Ok I've been trying to setup a wireless backup (time machine) with my MBP and AEBS w/USB Hard Drive for the past 2 hours and it's driving me nuts. Here's what I have, if anyone can help me out then it would be GREATLY appreciated:

1. Mac OSX 10.5.5
2. AEBS w/7.3.2 firmware
3. WD MyBook Home Edition
4. Santa Rosa MBP 15" 2.2GHz

I have hooked up the HDD to the AEBS and within Airport Utility -> Manual Setup -> Disks I can see my hard drive. File sharing is enabled.

I cannot see the drive in Finder (I can see my network under "shared" however), and when I try to "Choose Backup Disk" via Time Machine it does not see anything.

Please note that when I plug in the HDD directly via USB to my MBP, I can see it fine and Time Machine is ready and able to perform a backup.

Can anyone give me any other suggestions? :confused:
 
do you have the drive mounted on your mac you are trying to run time machine on?
 
The drive is connected to AEBS. It is not mounted physically (i.e. I cannot see it in Finder via Airport Disk if that's what you mean.

I upgraded the firmware on the MyBook to the latest version etc but still nothing in terms of showing up as a wireless backup. If I connect via USB I have no problems mounting and seeing the drive.
 
Sounds familiar

Hi Spliff

I have almost the same set up (MBPro 2.5 & a 120Gb Maxtor drive in a ICEBOX USB/eSATA enclosure, the rest is the same) and the same issues.

Drive is set up as extended and journaled and I can back-up with time machine to it via USB, works fine like this but when connected via the AEBS although it can see the drive it will not mount the volume. The drive is visible in finder and can be seen by Time Machine, it even says next back-up in ..... But, when the back-up starts then I get a fail and this message under the red ?

'The back-up volume could not be mounted'

I have been trying to solve this for two weeks now via various forum info with no success but think that someone knows because there have been some old posts that suggest there is an issue with non Time Capsule discs and this issue.

Hope someone can help.

PS. You can get Time Machine to see it if you do a back-up first via USB first and then connect via the AEBS.
 
vorkorsigan said:
The drive is visible in finder and can be seen by Time Machine, it even says next back-up in ..... But, when the back-up starts then I get a fail and this message under the red ?
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply, I can't even see the stupid drive in Finder or Time Machine while connected to AEBS, even though if I look at Airport Disks via the Airport Utility it is visible there. Really frustrating as I've tried everything (i.e. reformatted the HDD w/Mac OS Extended w/journaling)

PS. You can get Time Machine to see it if you do a back-up first via USB first and then connect via the AEBS.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion, I'll give this a try and if TM can't see it after I do my first backup then back to the store this POC Airport Extreme goes.
 
USB drive & Time Machine finally fixed!

Hi Guys

I have been playing with this problem for weeks and finally got it all working. This is what I did. I am using a MBP (2.5GHz, 2Gb early 2008) with 10.5.5 and AEBS running n @ 5GHz with a wired connection to an Express running b/g. Disk was a Hitachi 250GB PATA in an ICY BOX USB 2.0 enclosure. All software up to date as of yesterday.

1. Connected a USB drive to my MBP and using Disk Utility and format as HFS+ with Journaled set.

2. Disconnect the disk from the MBP and connect to the AEBS.

3. Check that the drive is recognized in the Airport Utility. Select the AEBS and manual set-up. Select the disk tab and you should see the drive, make sure it is shared. I set with the default password and no guests.

4. Open finder and select the AEBS in the shared section. You should see the drive. Click on it to open so that the drive is see on your desktop.

5. Open time machine prefs. from system preferences. Select change disk, you should see the disk in the selection list. If missing try disconnecting the drive and connecting via USB and selecting in time machine (but don't back-up) then disconnect and repeat 3,4 & 5. You should now see the timer in Time Machine to start counting down from 120 secs.

HERE IS THE IMPORTANT BIT.

6. Before the counter gets to 0 you eject the disk so it disappears from the desktop.

Now when the counter gets to 0 it should start backing up.

This worked for me but takes some time to complete unless you are connected by cable (12hrs via N @ 270mb/s). Now as Time Machine needs to connect to the drive it does so even though the drive is not mounted.

I have seen on other threads that the backups eventually fail but this hasn't happened yet but I'll let you know if it does. I am however not mounting the drive manually just to be sure as if you do this Time Machine cannot mount the sparse folder.

Good Luck

:D
 
The funny thing is, I actually had this setup working perfectly until yesterday. Today I'm running into crashes every time Time Machine starts up. When I talked to Apple, they maintain that this is an unsupported setup (even though it's apparently been working since the last AEBS update).

I looked in Software Update, and sure enough, there was an AEBS update yesterday. Anybody else struggling with this issue now that the software's been updated??

Thanks.
 
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