I’m banging my head against the wall hoping SOMEONE can help me. I have 2 WDTV boxes. I just moved all my files to a 3TB USB drive connected to an old XP machine. I’ve turned off the firewall and gone into services to enable DDE. I have no username or password on the computer.
I made sure the usergroup on the WDTV and laptop are both HOME. At first, I couldn’t get either WDTV to connect to the drive, I would get the “invalid username” error every time. I shut everything down, started it back up, still didn’t work. Then I went to share my frustrations with my wife and when I clicked to show her it didn’t work, low and behold it let me in. At this point I figure I’m home free, it’s working, I’ve streamed a couple of movies, now all I have to do is mirror the settings on my other WDTV and I’m golden, right? Not so fast. My second WDTV will not connect. I get the “invalid” message every time. I’ve done soft resets, hard resets, pulled the power plug, restored factory defaults, still nothing. I can also access the drive from my Windows 7 drive while it’s playing on the 1st WDTV so I don’t think it’s an issue with number of simultaneous connections. I’m out of ideas, I don’t understand how it works on one but not the other. Same firmware. I honestly don’t know what changed to make it start working on the 1st WDTV. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
So here’s an extra wrinkle, I finally got it to show up on my 2nd WDTV. I turned both WDTV boxes off, then turned off the XP laptop that the drive is connected to. Turned the laptop back on, waited about 30 minutes, then went upstairs and the WDTV connected.
Here’s the rub, I then went downstairs and it would no longer connect to the 1st WDTV that it had been working on. ARGH! It looks like it won’t allow me to access the drive from both devices, either one or the other. Again, I’m stumped, I can’t find any kind of connection limit and I’m still able to access the files from my usual Windows 7 laptop simultaneously.
Have you named the different WD’s uniquely?
I have, the one downstairs is just WDTVLive and the one upstairs is mancave… creative I know.
I just shut down the server laptop and both WDTVs again, waited, then was able to get it working on the one downstairs. It seems like it is related to multiple WD’s trying to access it at the same time.
Could that be related to the RAM in the laptop? It only has 512MB right now, although I just bought 1GB that should be here tomorrow. I don’t think it is since I’m able to stream video to my Windows 7 laptop and one WDTV at the same time. I’m wondering if it’s a limitation of XP and how it views the connection to the WDTV? Now that I’ve got 1GB of RAM coming I “could” upgrade that laptop to Windows 7, but I’d rather not since it really isn’t doing much. I’m going to use it for media and to store network backups, that’s pretty much it.
I’m stumped. I appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks
Chris
Try looking in XP’s Event Logs and see if there’s anything going on there.
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427
Here are two warnings, not really sure what either one means or how to fix it. I’m not positive these are related, but the time stamps look about right.
