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Airport Extreme not picking up 2 HD's

E

EddieRebel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 24, 2007
20
0
I just bought the Airport recently and was really excited to try out the HD sharing. I have 2 400gb external drives and both of them do not show up when plugged in. They were originally formatted for use on my old Windows XP box (I just switched to Mac about 2 months ago). I'm wondering if this is the reason why they aren't detected?

The light is always green on the Airport until I plug in a hard drive, then it switches to the flashing amber color. If I plug the hard drive into my MacBook Pro, it is detected and I can browse it but I don't seem to have access to delete files from it.

If anyone has a suggestion for this Mac newbie, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
 
FAT32 is fine for Airport Extreme.

Does Airport Extreme detect just one hard drive? Flashing amber light means Airport has a message for you.

Load up Airport Utility when its next connected and double click on the amber light. It'll tell you what the problem is.
 
Thanks for your help. When I do that, it says that the disk needs repair. I only have one disk connected at the moment, the other one I moved to the other room until I can get this straightened out.

OK now that I know it needs a repair, and it does show up when I click on Disks in the Airport Utility.. I guess I need to learn how to do a disk repair.
 
OK so it was much easier to find the Disk Repair than I thought. However, when I loaded up each hard drive, it did not give me any options to repair it. All of the options on that page were greyed out. I don't really want to reformat the drive just yet, but if I have to I can. I would just need to copy all of the data to another machine first.

Anyone know why I wouldn't have the options to Repair/Verify/etc? Thanks again for helping me out!
 
You can't repair a disk through Airport Extreme.

You need to connect it to your Mac, then use Disk Utility.
 
Thats actually what I did try. I plugged it in directly to my MacBook Pro and went into Disk Utility. It can see both drives there. I just don't have the options for Repair/Verify/etc.
 
Hmmm.

I'm wondering if your drive is formatted in NTFS (which is what Windows XP uses). Mac's can read NTFS but can't write to it.

What does it say the format is in Disk Utility?

If it is NTFS then you will have to format to FAT32 (for best compatibility with Windows' machines, but limited to 4GB max single file size) or HFS+ (Mac format - allows big file sizes and runs faster, but more hassle to get working with Window's machines).
 
Ah ha, that might just be the problem then. When I open it up, it does say that its in Windows NT Filesystem. Is there any way to convert this to another filesystem without losing everything? Or should I go ahead and just copy the data to another drive and then let OS X reformat it.

If that's the best option, I assume I should use the Mac filesystem instead?
 
There isn't any way to change file system without loosing all the data. Best way is to copy all the data onto another drive, format it and then copy back.

Mac format is what I'd recommend - it is a lot faster at mounting and servicing, plus gives you more single file storage.
 
Well I certainly do appreciate all of your help. I was initially worried that the Airport device was defective -- I'm glad thats not the case. Thanks again!
 
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