This is what I have learned in setting up my Airport Extreme USB Airdisk for Time Machine.
Your HDD has to be initialized properly, especially if it is or has been formatted to FAT32.
Using Apple Disk Utility located in the Utility's Folder.
Go to the Partition tab.
Create two partitions.
Under Options, select GUID Partition Table (what you would use to make a Mac OS boot disk) and click OK then Apply.
Once your partitions are in place, go back to the Partitions Tab and revert back to just one partition, still keeping the GUID Partition Table option.
Click OK and Apply.
Some people have gotten this to work without creating two partitions. If you like, try creating just a single partition, but using the GUID Partition Table option. This may be all it takes to break the chokehold.
After my drive was properly partitioned and initiated, it was available in the "Shared" menu (assuming file sharing is enabled), and I was able to set up an ext USB Airdisk in the Airport Extreme using the Airport Utility found in the "Utilities" folder of your Applications folder.
Connect the hard disk into the USB port on the back of the AirPort Extreme Base Station.
Launch AirPort Utility from the Applications:Utilities folder.
Select your Base Station from the list on the left then click the Manual Setup button.
Click Disks in the toolbar.
Click to select the File Sharing tab.
Make sure Enable file sharing is selected.
Choose With a disk password, or With base station password if you want to secure the shared disk with a password, it seems the "With Accounts" ption is to be avoided.
Choose Not allowed, Read only, or Read and write to assign guest access to the disk.
Select the Share disks over Ethernet WAN port checkbox if you want to provide remote access to the disk over the WAN port. If you do share disks over the Ethernet WAN port you can also select to Advertise disks globally using Bonjour.
Finally set the Workgroup and WINS Server for Windows File Sharing if you choose to do so.
Click the Update button to complete your changes.
AirPort will need to reboot the Base Station to continue.
Click the Continue button.
After doing these steps I was still not able to use it in Time Machine until I did the following:
Open Terminal and paste in the following command:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Hit return and I imagine your disk is now available in the Time Machine
I have read that the name of your Airdisk is case sensitive, it was not the case, but worth changing if you still have issues.
Also, the initial backup via wireless is quite slow. I recommend hardwiring to the network, ie, plugging the computer in question into your AEBS for the first Time MAchine backup, then use wireless Airport for subsequent backups.
I now have all four of my computers backing up to a single 1TB Airdisk and very happy about it.
Another tidbit I found was that people were not seeing the new Airdisk auto mount when Time Machine tried to do its thing. To enable auto recognition it seems all you need to do is mount the disk via the shared menu of any finder window, then go to your System Preferences and the Accounts preference pane and in the Login Items, just add the Airdisk to the menu.
Good luck to all and please post back with questions or comments.
Henry
Top
