RT-AC66U - windows 8.1 cannot see the router Samba server / connected USB Drive

[vatsal]

Hi,
guys, I need some help.

So i bought this new RT-AC66U. upgraded the firmware to latest.

Setup - Lenovo X240 running win 8.1, Seagate Goflex 2 TB drive, Ipad / phone.

having couple of weird problems:
1) My DLNA server takes too long to scan the drive. Its been up for more than 24 hours, but I can only see a few items on the drive. Does this take a very long time - the initial scan?

2) I configured the Samba server per instruction in this, but the server / attached USB drive just doesnt show up. the DLNA shows up, but the shared drive just doesnt - i have tried almost all the settings given in these forums, but short of a change of firmware to DD-WRT or something similar (that I am not really confident doing), i havent been able to make it work. Any clues?

Also, This is the second router I am using (returned one 66U already), so am not sure why this is happening - drive is perfectly fine and accessible through my linksys router.

 

[jegesq]

Vastal:

You wrote: "upgraded the firmware to latest".

What version FW did you upgrade to?

Also, how is the drive you're using (Seagate Goflex 2 TB drive) formatted? NTFS?

 

[jegesq]

Re: your Seagate USB connected to the USB2.0 on the 66U, see this: http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=21491

Theoretically, with the Samba server, it shouldn't matter if the disk is formatted in ext2/3/5 or NTFS because SAMBA will see it as a SMB/CIFS file system (at least it does in Windows). I have no idea if that's the case in Mac since I don't use one.

I don't know if the AC66U has a formatting initializer/utility for its own USB ports (I don't think so and don't recall seeing one in the GUI). I'm not aware of a way to format an external drive in ext/2/3/4 format directly under Windows. You can do an "exFAT" format but that's not really the same (it does allow both Mac and Win machines to read and write to an external drive, whereas NTFS only allows Macs to read). But you want a format that works with Linux and allows you to transfer files larger than 4Gb, so one way to go about this is to first back up your Seagate files, and then use a Ubuntu distro on a USB stick to boot into Linux, so you can reformat the Seagate in extfs. You could first try this on a spare drive if you have one laying around to see if it works before messing with your Seagate. I believe the System Rescue CD (Google it) has a tool for formatting a Linux disk (put System Rescue CD on a USB stick and boot from it to use the utilities).

One simple and easy thing you can try before going to the trouble of reformatting the Seagate is to make sure that your Seagate's volume label and any subdirectories don't contain any special characters other than dash, underscore or period (particularly avoid any spaces or $ ). For some reason, the router doesn't like those special characters.

 

[clintb]

Windows 8.1 turned off SMB 1.0/CIFS support, by default.

Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off > check "SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support"

Drove me friggin' nuts for a couple of weeks on a fresh install of Windows 8.1, and trying to connect to both my AC66 and Western Digital TV Live Hub. Also, make sure all devices are in the same workgroup, generally "WORKGROUP" is the default.