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Forum Discussion
MommaRoth
Nov 06, 2016Aspirant
Nighthawk r7300 doesn't recognize external hard drive
Hi all - (I searched for this in the community but didn't quite find the solution. If I've missed it please post a link & sorry for the trouble!) I run a small home office and recently bought a ...
- Nov 18, 2016
Hi ElaineM
Thanks for your response. I ended up returning the drive - no amount of partitioning or driver-downloads made it readable. I'm going to go back to the list of recommended external hard drives and see if I can find an exact match. I must say it's incredibly frustrating that this Netgear router is so persnickity about it's compatability.
I appreciate you spending a bit of time with me on this.
Regards, Susan
ElaineM
Nov 07, 2016NETGEAR Employee Retired
Hi MommaRoth
Welcome to the community!
5TB is to big for the router to read and handle.
Did you try USB stick? See if that will work.
Try to partition the HD and see if it will read it.
Also take note that the router will not be able to read the external hard drive if it requires software to be installed on the PC or if it's password protected.
MommaRoth
Nov 08, 2016Aspirant
Thank you for your response!
I had wondered whether it was just the size of the hard drive. I'd like to use this 5T drive - how many partitions should I do? How small do you think the partition should be in order to be recognized by the router? I've dug around the community for answers - looks like some say 3T but I haven't found any actual documentation.
I'm comfortable doing the partitioning - I'm expecting that I'll make them all OS extended journaled. But if I do the partition to 3T and it's still not recognized, can I go back and re-partition? (I'm guessing yes - I should be able to re-partition all day long if I'm not worried about losing any data, yes?)
I tried using a little USB stick and it reads just fine. This gives me hope of a solution today!
Thanks again - I appreciate that I don't have to wade into this alone :)