My wd live cant read external ntfs hard disk

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

hello

yersterday i bought  a wd live media player without hard disk. i plugged in my own WD external hard disk (NTFS) but nothing happened!!! the disk was 2.5 withour power supply. then i tried a second external hard disk, again NTFS but 3.5 with external power supply. Nothing happened again. i tried 3 usb sticks and only if the format was FAT32 i had access on them. if the format was NTFS then the result was that nothing was plugged in the media player. i did the reset, i plugged and unplugged several times (as i have been instructed from other relative forums) the disks and the usb sticks but nothing happened!!!

what can i do to have access on my hard disks?

thanks

nick

2

I have a humch you are plugging in the drives after the WD is turned on.  No, no, it does not work as a PC.  The drives are read upon bootup of the WD player.  So, turn of the player, remove the plug from the wall and before you plug it back in put the drive on the unit.  Now, plug in the player and turn it on.  Your drive should be read after a few minutes, being it is the first time.

If you do not have the user guide download it from WD support.  You will need it.

3

hate to disagree mike,

i plug eternal hdd’s (A/C Powered and Self Powered) all the time after the unit is ON without any dramas.

Have done so for years with WDTV Player (Gen1 Black one), WDTV Live and the WDTV Live Hub

WD units may take a while to recognize a drive if there are thousands of files on it

(and even longer if there are unsupported files eg. pdf,rar,zip,txt,rtf,doc,tgmd etc etc)

personally if i have ‘data’ files on the same external drive with my movies/tv … i put them into a folder with a “.”

eg.   .MyData    (this way, the WD doesent attempt to scan or recognise that folder … because it’s hidden to the WD)

so, in closing i can plug in my External NTFS 1TB drive which has about 400-500 media files on it … and the WD drive access light starts blinking a few seconds later and after maybe a minute it finishes with the drive ready to access.

P.S. Sorry, Nick i have no idea what your hdd problem is…  i have never had this problem

4

Agreed… the WDTVs all support Hot-Swapping drives…

BTW, nt1969, does your WDTV even flash the USB logo when you plug a disk in?  If the WDTV logo starts flashing, then the disk IS recognized by the system and is working on indexing the media.

5

Joey & Tony,

Thanks for setting me straight, although I recall one time when I ejected a drive from the WD, put it on the PC for something, then plugged it back on the WD ,and it did not boot.  Then again, I could have dreamed the whole thing!    :dizzy_face:

6

JoeySmyth wrote:
(and even longer if there are unsupported files eg. pdf,rar,zip,txt,rtf,doc,tgmd etc etc)

Sure about that? Doesn’t it just ignore the files completely due to their extension? In any case, Im also hotplugging a lot and it works.

Funny story about a buddy of mine though: he had trouble with slow boots and lockups of his (used) Live SMP which we chalked up to faulty hardware. Only when he finally swapped his expensive Oelbach HDMI cable for another no brand cable (5,- Euro) the Live worked as it should.

7

I have a WD Live with no HD and when I plug in my 1 TB WD USB drive it sees both partitions just fine.

It has a 300GB NTFS and about a 700 GB FAT32.

It could be something about the way you’re formatting the NTFS drives that’s causing the malfunction.

What I did with my 1 TB drive was I started with NTFS but my PS3 would not read it, so I made it completely FAT32.

But then I had some files that were over 4 GB in size so I shrunk the FAT32 partition to 700GB and made a 300GB NTFS using a 3rd party tool.

The name of the freeware tool I used escapes me at the moment, but I’ll look for it and post the name in the morning.

8

@Techflaws

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JoeySmyth wrote:
(and even longer if there are unsupported files eg. pdf,rar,zip,txt,rtf,doc,tgmd etc etc)

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

Techflaws wrote:

Sure about that? Doesn’t it just ignore the files completely due to their extension?

_____________________________________________________________________

In testing WDTV Live Hub, it 100% Scans them (i copied 100 .tgmd files to the Hub’s internal hdd and the drive activity light started flashing and the media compiling message appears)

So, no … it doesn’t " ignore" them. It scans them like any other file, but after that,of course, it won’t "display " them.

Which i why i isolate files the Hub won’t display, by putting them into a folder with a “dot” prefix which 100% prevents unnecessary scanning of non supported files.

Which makes the process of drive recognition and access to contents a faster process.

P.S. For anyone who wants to make a "."folder …

Open Notepad to create a *.*txt file … inside it type      mkdir .mypcstuff 

then change the extension and save it as a *.*bat file eg. mypcstuff.bat

double click it and it will create a .mypcstuff folder for you.

Place all non media files in this folder, and next time you connect your external drive into your WD …

it won’t Scan the contents of this folder.

9

Have you tried using ExplorerXP www.explorerxp.com to add the dot directly to the folder. Saves all the messing about.

10

KrisR wrote:

It could be something about the way you’re formatting the NTFS drives that’s causing the malfunction.

Doubtful. My drives have various partition sizes and where formatted from inside Windows and Ubuntu, none of which made any difference.

JoeySmyth wrote:
So, no … it doesn’t " ignore" them. It scans them like any other file, but after that,of course, it won’t "display " them.

 

Which i why i isolate files the Hub won’t display, by putting them into a folder with a “dot” prefix which 100% prevents unnecessary scanning of non supported files.

Yeah, I’ve been doing this pretty much since day one too. I just wasn’t sure how smart WD’s scanning algorithm was.