I'm in the middle of setting up my new Airport base station and find the instructions less than useful. If you're communicating by cable you need to use a X-over cable in the port with the two arrows. In Sys Pref Network, set the manual IP to 10.0.1.2 and router to 10.0.1.1. Now you should be able to read the Airport configuration. The failure to read configuration message is not a disk read failure.