Airport Extreme can't see one of 3 external drives

P

peterv6

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I'm running OS X 10.6.6 on a 17" MacBook Pro, with an Airport Extreme Base Station. I've hooked up 2 1TB Western Digital My Book external drives to the AEBS via a 4 port USB hub. They work perfectly (even with Time Machine!). Today I attached a WD 40 GB external drive to the AEBS, via the same hub. When I look at the AEBS in Finder, I see the Two 1TB drives, and the 40GB drive, but the 40GB drive is listed as "WD40??????". When I click on the drive, I get an error message of:

There was an error connecting to the server “VNet Airport Router”. Check the server name or IP address, and then try again.

If you are unable to resolve the problem contact your system administrator.

Can anyone tell me what might be the problem? Does that drive need to be formatted in any specific format? I'm at a loss, as when I plug that drive directly into a USB port on my MBP, it works just fine.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Peter V.
 
Quoted from my original post: "I'm at a loss, as when I plug that drive directly into a USB port on my MBP, it works just fine."

MBP = MacBook Pro.
 
Another question - does the 40 GB drive work when plugged directly into the AEBS - without the hub attached?

Is that external USB self-powered (with a separate power supply?), or bus-powered (through the USB connection?)
 
I actually figured out it was a format problem. The drive was formatted NFTS, which won't work with a Mac. I reformatted it to MAC OS Extended (journaled), and voila, it works!
 
peterv6 said:
...The drive was formatted NFTS, which won't work with a Mac. ...
Click to expand...

Not quite correct. An NTFS volume is natively read-only with OS X. You can't write, or modify files already on the drive. And, you can install NTFS-3G drivers to allow full access to an NTFS drive.
But, your solution to format as a MacOS Extended volume is fine, too.
 
DeltaMac,
I'll defer to your expertise, and appreciate your answer, but I have a question. If, like you said "An NTFS volume is natively read-only with OS X. You can't write, or modify files already on the drive.", why wouldn't I have been able to at least read the files on the drive? Check the error message in my original post. I couldn't access the drive, and I wasn't attempting to write anything, just read. Your answer makes sense, but I'd like to know why I couldn't access the files or at least the file listings.
Peter V.
 
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