WDTV Live doesn't see External Harddrive when hooked up directly

Hey guys.

I have a WDTV Live Plus, and have all my movies and file in one external HDD (WD Essentials 2TB). When I first hooked up my HD directly to WDTV, it worked fine, but videos would always freeze during playback. Due to this I ended up powering off the WDTV box by unplugging the power cord in the back.

Since then, everytime I hook up the Essentials External HDD, it never shows up on in the disk manager, even after a factory reset. The weird this is that I put a regular USB thumb drive into the WDTV and it was able to read that perfectly.

The HDD works perfectly on all my Macs, and actually, If I wanted to access the files from my HDD to WDTV live, I found out that I could hook my HDD to my Macbook and then stream over via Media Server, but due to the wiring and USB cords I find that annoying, and would still like to hook the HDD directly to the WDTV.

Is there anyway to get the WDTV to read the HDD without having to reformat the HDD? Thanks

Its weird that it used to work and now it doesn’t, did you updated the firmware on the WD TV? And what type of format are you using for the My Book?

When I first got the box, I upgraded the firmware to the latest one, so I think it was 1.06?, not 100% sure what firmware. But I haven’t upgraded or downgraded the firmware at all since doing it at the very beginning before every plugging any external source in.

My WD External is formatted the basic Mac compatible way I guess, which I assume is SATA? 

Do you think if I turned on media library and plug it in would it work? I realized that is something I haven’t done yet