Maddening Airport Extreme Disk Disconnects

Until upgrading to Airport Extreme software version 7.2.1 using my Airport Extreme to connect USB disks was working quite well. Now it works not at all. It turns out after spending a couple of hours trying to see what I might be doing wrong that there are many people with this problem. Sadly there are not reports of people being successful in working around it. In my case it was easy enough to swap them back to the iMac which is usually on when I want to connect to the disks. I sure hope Apple gets this fixed soon.

[Edit] -- Changed the incorrect mention of Express to Extreme per the comment.

Until they do there is a way to get back to a working version of the firmware.

  1. Open AirPort Utility
  2. Select a base station (to get mine to show up I had to power cycle it because although it was working it would not show up in AirPort Utility
  3. Hold down the Option key and choose "Check for Updates"
  4. A complete list of all updates will be shown and you can choose a previous version from the list

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4 Comments

Express?

Are you sure this is for the Express and not the Extreme? In theory the Express has never supported hardrive sharing. Which firmware version do you say is working for this?
thanks

Extreme

Apologies for the confusion... it's Extreme all the way and my post was incorrect. Thanks for pointing it out and it's updated.

Did you ever find a solution

Did you ever find a solution for this? I'm having the same trouble where the disk and printer drop off the network, and the only way to get them back is to power the Airport off and on.

More recent versions of firmware

I haven't seen this problem recently. It seems to have generally been fixed in more recent versions of the software.