Question concerning hard drive sharing on a Extreme Base Station

[futurase]

I have a Windows PC (w/ Vista Home Premium) and a new 15" MacBook Pro. Just bought the new Airport Extreme Wireless Base Station. Installed Airport software on the PC. Works great. Macbook works great for surfing the internet on both.

I have a WD 120GB Passport USB hard drive I want to share on the base station. I know it is designed for this.

Here is the problem:
I plug the USB hard drive in the base station and it starts flashing yellow. If I check Airport with my PC or Mac it says there is a drive error. The Hard drive is formatted for NTFS.
I think a base station can not read a NTFS format correct??? If not and I have to format the drive for a MAc as NFS Journaled than how is the PC going to be able to read it???

Is it possible for a Mac AND a PC to share files off of the drive???

I called Apple tech support and the guy I spoke to had no idea about drive formats at all. He was worthless.

Apple advertises this base station for a Mac AND a PC.

If I plug the drive into the Mac or PC it works great of course. You just have to copy files to the Mac as a Mac can not write to a NTFS drive. Easily done.

What do I need to do to make it work???

Thanks,

Norman Ross Jr.

 

[skorpien]

The drive needs to be formatted Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) aka HFS+

The AEBS is designed to let the computer communicate with the hard drive regardless of it's OS. Mac OS X communicates via AFP while Windows communicates via SMB. A Windows system will be able to read and write to an HFS+ formatted drive connected to the AEBS. I have a TC with an HFS+ formatted drive attached, and both Vista and XP can read and write to it.

A few things to take into consideration: make sure you have file sharing set up in AirPort Utility > Disks; set up the workgroup name to be the same as the workgroup that your Windows machines are a part of; make sure to add the AEBS IP address (10.0.1.1 by default) to the list of trusted zones/networks of any software firewalls installed on your system; and install the AirPort Utility for Windows to make sure the setup of your AEBS attached HDD is as easy as possible (it's not necessary as you could map the drive to a drive letter without installing AirPort Utility, but AU does it automatically for you).

 

[futurase]

Thank for the help. It is very much appreciated.

Norman Ross Jr.