Accessing an external hard drive on my network

Hi all,

New to the website so take it easy on me

I have recently converted to Mac and I am just getting used to how things work, however I have the following issue that I would appreciate some help with:

My ISP has given me a wireless router (huawei HG556a) that is working fine. The router has USB access on it for sharing your external hard rive across the network. When I connect the external hard drive it is recognized by the router on the admin pages.

The problem is that on my Mac book I cant see or mount the drive. I have tried the following:
~ smb://Router address - after trying this the Mac asks me for a password, to which all combinations of passwords come back as invalid.
~ nfs://Router address - error message
~ ftp://Router address - works with cyberduck
~ //Router address - Brings me to a network folder with nothing in it
~ Finder/go/connect to server - combination of the above with the same results.

The router has two usb's and I have tried various external hard drives, flash drives etc. The hard drive that I am using at the moment has three partitions (two fat32 formatted and one ntfs formatted) all of which are recognized by the router.

If this query has been answered before apologies in advance (didn't see in FAQ etc)

Any help would be appreciated.

Also remember I am relatively new to Mac

Thanks

bluefish.

Are you sure this device supports sharing a connected hard drive over the network? I can't find anything stating that on their website, although their website does border on useless. What networking protocols does the manual say to use?

Thanks for the reply Lifeisabeach!

Yes it definitely does - as I have done it using a windows pc.

Would you believe the router didn't come with a manual however the ISP (vodafone Ireland) did post the manual contents at the below link:

Huawei HG556a User Manual - Vodafone View

As you will have guessed at this stage this is new to me - so if not in the manual where else would I find what the network protocols are?

Thanks again

Bluefish

Bluefish007 said:

Thanks for the reply Lifeisabeach!

Yes it definitely does - as I have done it using a windows pc.

Would you believe the router didn't come with a manual however the ISP (vodafone Ireland) did post the manual contents at the below link:

Huawei HG556a User Manual - Vodafone View

As you will have guessed at this stage this is new to me - so if not in the manual where else would I find what the network protocols are?

Click to expand...

Pages 6-3 through 6-5 go into detail of how to configure the router using ftp and smb (short for SAMBA).

Now that I think of it... if Cyberduck worked with ftp, then the ftp is set up correctly. OS X's Finder has no built-in functionality for connecting to ftp servers that I know of... thus you need an ftp client like Cyberduck.

As for SMB... follow the instructions and see if that will get you going via the Finder.

Yep already followed the instructions and they brought me to a network folder but when I click into it there is nothing in it!

I can get the FTP working but it is no us to me as I don't want to transfer the files to the pcs on the network just access them.

Might have to stump up for a time capsule if I can't get this going...

Bluefish

So there is no folder on the device that has been flagged for sharing? You may have to do this from Windows. Well... what do you see when you access it via Windows? And what protocol are you using?

My windows pc is down currently but from memory a folder called share?

So if I use the windows pc to access the drive through USB and make it available for share it might be recognised by the Mac?

Sorry for the dumb question but what do you mean by what protocol am I using?

Bluefish007 said:

My windows pc is down currently but from memory a folder called share?

So if I use the windows pc to access the drive through USB and make it available for share it might be recognised by the Mac?

Sorry for the dumb question but what do you mean by what protocol am I using?

Click to expand...

Protocol: smb vs ftp.

But yes, try accessing it with.... oh wait. Try this:

smb://ipaddressofrouter/share (or Share, if it is capitalized)