Accessing an external hard drive attached to a router

[fz0rb4]

Hi,

just got a new macbook pro and I cannot see an external hard drive that is attached via a USB to my router. Can anyone help please ?

Thank You

 

[miles01110]

Is it on? What kind of router is it? What kind of hard drive is it? What format is the hard drive in?

 

[fz0rb4]

Hi Miles,

Yep it's on - can see it thru my Windows PC.
It's a Belkin Play Max Router
It's a Western Digital Elements Hard Drive, file system is FAT

Thank You

 

[fz0rb4]

Ok it looks like no one can help - the only additional piece of info I have is that I changed the setting so that it displays all external divices on my desktop - but this seems to have made no difference.

I know there are issues with reading an FAT/NTFS format - but I would expect the mac to at least find the hard drive

 

[Darth.Titan]

Did you install the router's software on your Mac? According to the manual shared drives have to be managed using Belkin's software.

BTW, the format of a drive on a network share doesn't matter in the slightest.

 

[miles01110]

BTW, the format of a drive on a network share doesn't matter in the slightest.

Err... are you sure about that? For a drive that's plugged into a router via USB it seems like it would matter. I know true NASs are format-independent, though.

 

[old-wiz]

Did you install the router's software on your Mac? According to the manual shared drives have to be managed using Belkin's software.

It would make sense that you'd need some software on your computer to manage access to the disk, otherwise two computers could access it at the same time and make a mess of things. There needs to be some kind of synchronization.

 

[fz0rb4]

All,

Thank you, loaded the driver and it seems to work now. 🙂

 

[rahath]

I had the same problem and found an easier solution:

Finder -> Go -> Connect to server

Type in smb://readyshare and hit connect. Seems to work!