Time Capsule 4th Gen crashes after accessing external HD via USB

[ccwestcliff]

So I have a shiny new TC 4G 2TB and so far everything is smooth sailing. Today I tried to attach an external USB HD which worked fine and I can see to two partitioned drives on that HD but as soon as I want to access a sub folder (FAT32) on one of the drives, the TC wireless crashes (no access to internet) and shortly after I get an error message stating that the connection to both servers (ie drives) was disconnected.

Any ideas?

We have one Windows 7 machine in the house so I would like to keep FAT32 if possible but would change if this causes the problem.

Thanks!

 

[Brian33]

I don't know if the FAT32 is causing the problem, but if the USB disk is going to stay plugged into the Time Capsule, there's no reason it has to be a FAT filesystem, even for access from your Windows 7 machine. This is because the Windows machine never actually sees the file format on the USB disk. Instead, Windows uses the SMB network protocol to talk to the TC, and only the TC directly accesses the file system on the USB drive.

My TC's internal drive is formatted HFS+, and our Windows XP machine can read and write to the internal disk, because of how SMB works.

So, there's no harm, and maybe some benefit, in formatting the USB disk as HFS+. Unless you want to sometimes unplug the USB from the TC and then plug it directly-attached to your Windows 7 machine... for that you would need a FAT (or FAT32, can't remember which the TC supports) filesystem.

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This Apple document (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2426) says:

Time Capsule support USB storage devices that are formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS-plus), FAT16, or FAT32

So it doesn't seem like the format you've got is the problem. Still, I'd try re-formatting the USB drive (after saving anything on it, of course).

 

[ccwestcliff]

Thanks, I didn't think of that and will try, because if is works there is no reason to plug the external HD directly to the Windows 7 machine!