Recently Eliza and I signed up for Netflix. Ever since moving into our new apartment I haven’t had the Xbox 360 connected to the Internet because of the location of my cable modem/router and because the Xbox 360 does not come Wifi-enabled by default.

This hasn’t been too much of an issue since I haven’t been playing any games using the Xbox 360 (we’ve been playing a lot more Wii though) and haven’t needed any of the Live features. But, Netflix has an Xbox 360 application that makes it simple to stream any movies directly to your TV in HD. Daddy wants.

I didn’t want to spend the money for the “dongle” or whatever it is to give the Xbox 360 Wifi capability so I was very pleased when I came across Alex King’s blog post about using the Airport Express to provide a wired connection. I already have an Airport Express that I use for Airtunes to my surround sound set up which is right next to the Xbox 360. I’ve had Alex’s tutorial ‘starred’ in Google Reader for weeks and today I finally took the time to get it set up.

It works great. (And the Airtunes capability remains.)

Alex links to an Apple Support article that, inexplicably, isn’t complete. Where the article lacks Alex provides some tips so be sure to read both the support article and his blog post in full before you begin to help alleviate any headaches.

Since there seems to be a lot of people having this same issue and not a lot being said about solving the issue, I thought I’d write a quick post to document the process of fixing this problem.

I’ve owned an Airport Extreme for awhile and, just this weekend, out of the blue my Airdisk (a 500GB USB Hard Drive) won’t mount to the Airport Extreme anymore. If I connect the USB hard drive to my computer directly, it mounts just fine, all of the files are there, and there is seemingly no issue with the drive or the cable.

Things I’ve tried so far

• Restarting the Airport Extreme – I did this by unplugging it with the hard drive on, off, plugged in, unplugged, etc. I’ve rebooted it several times.
• Restarting the hard drive – as with the Airport Extreme, I tried multiple combinations in order to get the AE to recognize the disk.
• Update the firmware – as coincidence would have it a new version of the Airport Extreme firmware became available this weekend and so I’ve now updated to that version of both the firmware and the Airport Utility software.
• Trying to directly access the drive through /volumes/TempleArchives/ etc.
• Using the Airport Utility > Manual Setup > Disks pane. The drive does not show up there at all.

Looking at the activity LEDs for the drive it seems as though the Airport Extreme never really sees the drive being connected at all.  My last assumption, so far, is that the USB port on my Airport Extreme may have died. My next attempt at seeing if that is true is to connect a printer or some other USB device through that same port to see if that is the cause.

To be updated…

Update June 12, 2009: – Finally, an update! I was so frustrated by this problem that I actually didn’t work on it for months. I hooked up my USB hard drive directly into my laptop and dealt with it.

I’m happy to say that as of today I’ve gotten the USB hard drive mounted to my Airport Extreme again!

I ended up trying most, if not all, of the suggestions in the comments (thanks so much to everyone that wrote out a detailed suggestion for me try, you’re too kind). However it was Scott’s suggestion to connect the USB hard drive to a USB hub prior to plugging the drive into the AExtreme that ended up doing the trick. My Airport Extreme is currently running on firmware 7.3.2, instead of 7.4, and is connected to a USB hub and then to the drive. For now, that is working and I’m sticking with it until I dare update the firmware again to see if the “hub idea” continues to work with the updated version of the firmware.

Again, thanks to all for your suggestions. I hope anyone that finds this (which is about 100 people per day currently) can go through the suggestions and find one that works for them.

The problems with my routers began a few years ago with some old, crappy, blue router that I actually can’t remember where I got it or who the manufacturer was. I quickly graduated to a Linksys WRT54G. This router was “ok” but every few days it would “lock up”. The internal network would remain perfectly active while the connection to the Internet was severed.

I dealt with this for a little over a year – I think. And when I decided to upgrade to something more reliable, I went with an Airport Extreme. I thought I’d get the “Apple experience” and also take advantage of the Airport’s ability to share USB hard drives with everyone on the network. But I suppose it wasn’t meant to be so.

The Airport Extreme drops the WiFi connection altogether and the SSID disappears from the list on my Macintosh. The USB hard drive that I have is, seemingly, incompatible with the Airport Extreme. I bought this hard drive for this very reason.

I just don’t think I’m supposed to have a reliable WiFi connection.

October 22, 2007 at 6:00pm EST: Why I included the time in this update stamp I may never know – but I’m excited to let you all know that I have solved the issue with my USB Hard Drive not connecting to my Airport Extreme; it was the USB cable. The cable itself must have been bad because it got to the point where the drive wouldn’t even mount to my computer directly.

Thanks to my friend Larry Halff for helping me troubleshoot the problem which led me to believe it was the cable. Often times it is the simplest of reasons why something is happening. Thanks!