Purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 750GB USB drive today. Now that the AirPort Extreme Base Station firmware has been upgraded to allow an attached USB drive to work with Time Machine, I thought it would be a good time to give it a try.
Plugged in the drive, fired up Drive Utility to “erase” or reformat the drive. Errors on each and every try. Errors such as :
“Volume Erase failed with the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit”
and
“Disk Erase failed with the error. File system formatter failed ”
Some googling around finally revealed the solution here. The trick, as it turns out, is to
“Go into Partition and if you want 1 partition, just leave it at 1. However, click the Options… button underneath that Volume Scheme and select either GUID Partition Table or Apple Partition depending on if you have an Intel or PowerPC. The default (at least on mine) was set to Master Boot Record which is for Windows. I created one big partition using GUID (in my case) and then was able to go back and “Erase” it to make it Journaled and its working fine now.”
Brilliant! Time Machine is now backing up to a drive connected to my AirPort Extreme Base Station.