External Hard Drives shows no Media Avail

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Hello,

I just set up WD TV Live, upgraded firmware and connected my WD 2TB My Book to it via USB cable. The screen display shows connecting, then disappears as if it has connected, but when selecting from local storage it reads “There is no media available for playback.”

There are files of all sorts on this hard drive, which is formatted to FAT32. Can anyone assist me in having the WD find/see the media.

Again, this is a direct connection from local storage, not a media server issue. I have tried another WD hard drive, also FAT32, and had no luck. Please help.

2

Update:

Tried with a 500Gb WD external hard drive, also FAT32, and it worked fine. Still need help if there’s any way to get the 2TB working. This thing is going back if there’s not…l

3

Since nobody’s responding I’ll keep updating for others in my situation.

Not happy with this purchase at all. Many of my files get the message cannot play even though the files are supported types, per the user manual.

4

You need to have some patience. 30 minutes isn’t much time to expect replies…

2nd, why would you want to use fat32? That imposes some pretty significant limitations. Have you tried NTFS?

For one of your files that won’t play, please post the MEDIAINFO report (text format).

5

Individual files not playing is not the problem I’m concerned with; the WD device not recognizing the 2TB hard drives is. I’m using FAT32 because that’s the format Xbox takes, which was handling my media needs prior to this. Reformatting a filled 2TB hard drive and keeping the files is quite a timely undertaking, I’m sure you realize, and I’ll just go back to xbox and return this if that’s what I need to do.

However, it’s clearly not what I need to do, since other FAT32 drives of lesser capacity are working fine.

I’m working on this now, hence my frequent updates.

6

You don’t have to reformat or discard data to convert from fat32 to NTFS.

Just use the windows convert command (built in to windows). Worth a try.

I just don’t know if there are limitations with the WD and FAT32 drives of that size as so few people seem to be doing that.

7

Sir or Madam, please stop responding to me if you “just don’t know” or only give out irresponsible advice because “it’s worth a shot.” I am seeking one who DOES know.

If Ntfs doesn’t work I would have to convert back to fat to use with Xbox, which WOULD erase the drive, and should be warned before anyone else does it.

Thanks for the replies, but move on.

8

For others. This is the solution: http://wdtvhd.com/index.php?showtopic=56831

9

Wow. Using an error-free disk is the solution? Glad you figured that out!

10

Well that was a laugh a minute.:smileyvery-happy:

11

Csd208 wrote:
Sir or Madam, please stop responding to me if you “just don’t know” or only give out irresponsible advice because “it’s worth a shot.” I am seeking one who DOES know.

So you expect somebody on the Internet to know positively why your particular drive isn’t working?  Not expecting anything unreasonable, are you.

As for it being irresponsible to suggest converting to NTFS, well, FAT is an ancient (in computer terms) filesystem, and is frankly extremely terrible for storing videos.  Yes, terrible!!  I say this, BTW, as a professor of computer science.  So, take your own advice and move on…to a filesystem from this century.

12

Isn’t NTFS from the last century or even millennium?

:slight_smile:

13

It originated a long time ago, but it has been updated.  Here is what Wiki has on versions:

And it says symlinks capabilities were added to the NTFS that came with Vista, along with some “self-healing” capabilities.

And self-healing was apparently updated for WIndows 8:

http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8s-ntfs-health-model-to-be-less-intrusive-4010026152/

So NTFS is evolving slightly and has been updated this century.  Of course, compared to filesystem development in the UNIX/Linux world (ext4, ZFS, Btrfs, etc.), WIndows is a sad backwater.  :cry:

Here is a good MS article telling you–essentially–not to use FAT unless you are still using Win98:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/comparing-ntfs-and-fat-file-systems

14

I don’t think that the op wanted to stay in the dark ages it seems he had no choice in order to keep the drive compatible with his Xbox.

15

Uh, yeah, got that.  Looks like I needed to add a smiley to my response, which was at least partly tongue-in-cheek.  Nonetheless, his desire to maintain compatibility doesn’t in any way excuse what I found to be his rudeness responding to suggestions nor his claiming that converting to NTFS was “irresponsible advice.”  YMMV.

16

ncarver wrote:
Of course, compared to filesystem development in the UNIX/Linux world (ext4, ZFS, Btrfs, etc.), WIndows is a sad backwater.  :cry:

Yeah, the SDA folks should be shot for adopting ExFAT for SDXCs.