Airport Extreme, Hard Drive Enclosure

[nerdstein]

I recently purchased one of the new 802.11n Airport Extreme Base Stations. Previously, I used a firewire hard drive enclosure. I went to tiger direct and purchased a Coolmax USB seen here ->http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3071630&sku=T13-1081.

To my dismay, even after the hard drive and new enclosure worked via USB on my iBook g4, it does not show up under the accessible disks on my Airport Extreme Base Station. I have successfully pulled up thumb drives and my printer.

Does anyone know why this is happening and does anyone have a work around?

Any help is appreciated... I bought the router for that functionality.

 

[Apple Ink]

Dig here:

http://forums.techguy.org/apple-macintosh/557743-connecting-external-hard-drive-airport.html

 

[nerdstein]

Thanks, but...

AplInk, thank you for the quick reply.

I had found that last night when I did a Google search to try and resolve the problem. I thoroughly read through the posting, including meticulously following the steps to add this AirDisk.

I think my issue, which may be similar to the people who posted, is that my drive never shows up. Although the drive works on my iBook and PC, it is not even being recognized by the Extreme router.

Is there a way to make this drive show up or a work around? In the least, is there a list of supported USB enclosures/USB hard drives?

 

[Apple Ink]

Backup your data and format the drive in HFS+. Try connecting now!

 

[nerdstein]

Thank you, I will give that a shot this evening and post tomorrow.

Right now, it is FAT32. To the best of my knowledge, this is supported by the router.

Do you think reformatting as HFS will work then?

 

[Jase2008]

Wonder if anyone can help.

I have got an airport extreme with an external hd connected to it that has been working great, allowing all my macs to access it wirelessly on my network at home.

However, as of last night, it no longer shows up on my finder but i am connected to my airport wirelessly for my internet.

How can i access my airport settings to check everything is ok? I cant seem to find it, also any ideas why it suddenly stopped working, essentially overnight.
cheers.

 

[nerdstein]

How can i access my airport settings to check everything is ok?

Do you have the airport utility installed on any of your Macs?

That application comes on a CD with the airport and allows you to change the settings.

 

[skorpien]

Wonder if anyone can help.

I have got an airport extreme with an external hd connected to it that has been working great, allowing all my macs to access it wirelessly on my network at home.

However, as of last night, it no longer shows up on my finder but i am connected to my airport wirelessly for my internet.

How can i access my airport settings to check everything is ok? I cant seem to find it, also any ideas why it suddenly stopped working, essentially overnight.
cheers.

Open AirPort Utility (do a spotlight search) and go into manual setup. Then click the Disks tab and see if your hard drive is listed. Although what I suspect is your AEBS might just need a restart. Once my Time Capsule wouldn't list my printer, but after a restart it showed up again.

 

[Jase2008]

Open AirPort Utility (do a spotlight search) and go into manual setup. Then click the Disks tab and see if your hard drive is listed. Although what I suspect is your AEBS might just need a restart. Once my Time Capsule wouldn't list my printer, but after a restart it showed up again.

thanks alot, found that and quite right i didnt find my disc there.

How do i do a restart?

Is that just the button at the back?

also, is this a soft or hard reset?
As doing this. will this require me to set up the base station again with passwords etc?



fixed, i figured it out. Thanks for your help though.

 

[nerdstein]

An update

Well.. I spent all weekend messing with this. A friend of mine brought a second hard drive enclosure. It worked flawlessly. This meant that either the hard drive itself was bunk to the Airport Extreme, or the enclosure was. I then took the hard drive out and put it into the other enclosure. It worked and has been working great since!

So, it appears that the Coolmax enclosure is not supported by the base station. I thought USB was a fairly standard means of communicating (since the U in USB is Universal...) but I guess the Airport Extreme just doesn't support that device. I'd be curious to see if it ever would even in next updates or if the enclosure is just a ginormous POS. It's still surprising since the USB drive comes up on my iBook.