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External Hard Drive will not show up on Airport Base

S

SandersHokie

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 16, 2006
419
0
It shows up in the utilities thing, but when i try to go to the disk utilities nothing shows up, and nothing is showing up on my laptop.

i have it hooked up with a USB hub and then the hard drive is hooked up to that. any help? thanks.
 
SandersHokie said:
It shows up in the utilities thing, but when i try to go to the disk utilities nothing shows up, and nothing is showing up on my laptop.

i have it hooked up with a USB hub and then the hard drive is hooked up to that. any help? thanks.
Click to expand...

Try it without the hub.
 
If you read on Apple's discussions forums you'll see a lot about this. Try this first. Mount the disk on your mac, then eject it. Without turning the drive's power off, plug it into the AEBS. If it is formated FAT32 or HFS, you should be able to see it in the airport utility and it should mount on your mac.

Do you have a password set for drive access in the airport utility? Do you have the AirPort Disk Utility installed locally on your mac? Is it set to automatically discover AirPort disks?

AEBS have trouble with some USB hard drives, some need to be directly plugged in, some need to be mounted on a mac first, some just work. I have a Lacie 500GB Porsche drive that I have to have powered on first, then plug into the AEBS and then power on the base station for it to work. Otherwise I have to mount it on my mac, unmount and then plug it in.

Apple's implementation is not great, but with some fiddling, most can get it to work. A few drives, mainly USB/Firewire type drives, don't work at all. YMMV
 
I should also add that my drive works as I described above on firmware 7.1.1. When I tried 7.2.1 it worked for a day, then it would stop. If you're having trouble, don't give up hope yet and try changing firmware to 7.1 or 7.1.1 if you have 7.2.x installed
 
saxman said:
If you read on Apple's discussions forums you'll see a lot about this. Try this first. Mount the disk on your mac, then eject it. Without turning the drive's power off, plug it into the AEBS. If it is formated FAT32 or HFS, you should be able to see it in the airport utility and it should mount on your mac.

Do you have a password set for drive access in the airport utility? Do you have the AirPort Disk Utility installed locally on your mac? Is it set to automatically discover AirPort disks?

AEBS have trouble with some USB hard drives, some need to be directly plugged in, some need to be mounted on a mac first, some just work. I have a Lacie 500GB Porsche drive that I have to have powered on first, then plug into the AEBS and then power on the base station for it to work. Otherwise I have to mount it on my mac, unmount and then plug it in.

Apple's implementation is not great, but with some fiddling, most can get it to work. A few drives, mainly USB/Firewire type drives, don't work at all. YMMV
Click to expand...

cool thanks, i'll give it a shot.
 
Same Problem - USB disk>USB hub>AEBS doesn't show up

Just providing further documentation of the no-disk via AEBS from my own perspective. Here's my setup:

*Seagate "FreeAgent" USB 2.0 250Gig drive connected to a
*D-Link USB 2.0 7-port hub connected to the
*Airport Extreme Base Station 802.11n

The Seagate disk does indeed show up under "Airport Utility>Manual Configuration>Disks", but neither my MBP nor my wife's Macbook can see it.

Other things of note: There is also a Canon printer plugged into the same USB hub that the Seagate HD is plugged into (Printer>7-port USB 2.0 hub>AEBS), and it works great. Airport Utility sees it and both our laptops can print to it.

Also, the Seagate hard drive works fine when plugged directly into the laptops.

I did try the trick mentioned above - power-on one device at a time as well as plugging the external hard drive into my MBP, then into the hub without powering down. No luck. Going to hit the apple boards to see if I can find a solution.

EDIT: Found the problem. I simply had to format external hard disk as Mac OS Extended with Disk Utilities. Here's a link to the step-by-step for people like me who need that sort of thing: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306971
 
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