Does the 2 TB Western Digital My Book Essential, the 2TB Western Digital Elements and the 2TB Samsung Story Station work with the WD TV Media Player Live? Any help is greatly appreciated
compatability with WD ex HDD’s
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3805#harddrive
Hello Friend
The answer is NO i’ve bought an elements 2tb NEW SHAPE uses usb A mini not B (printer type) and it DEFO wont work with the live player!!! I’m well Pi55ed.
I’ve also got 3x 1tb elements old type and they all work fine, but as i’m out of space i need more, as wd live doesn’t support usb hubs.
Best to save and get a sharespace if you’ve got tonnes of media
Hope helps?
Um, you DO know there are mini to regular USB cables, don’t you?
If it’s just a cable issue, that’s easily resolved.
ElliBoog, you’ve got a misunderstanding of USB.
There shouldn’t be a cable issue at all. The drive may use Mini-USB-B, but the Host End is still USB-A, just like every other USB drive in the world… ;)
However, there HAS been talk about the Elements not working with the Live due to firmware issues. I’m not sure if WD has resolved that.
I have exactly the same problem, i just bought a WD Elements 2 TB disk, but i cannot see it appearing on the WD TV Live unit, there are no problems with the connecting this device to a PC… but i cannot see it in my WD TV Live…
I am using one of the latest firmwares (Beta versions) 1.03.41…
Read on another forum that i had to connect it to Windows, and make it an active diske… but this didn’t help it either 
Any suggestions WD Support??
Bummer… hoped there will be a solution where i didn’t had to remove anything
I got almost half of the disk full already…
Well i will try it out and see if it works…
Just finished backing up all my contents on the disk… and reformatted the disk as written to an NTFS disk with Standard Formating
I added some photos so that there are some data on it…
When connected to the WD-TV Live there was no disk appearing… tried it on input 1…
Sorry I got here too late regarding this matter
Instead of formatting a HDD, one can use the ‘CONVERT’ command to change the format from FAT32 to NTFS without losing stored content.
I’ve done this before and had no problems/issues at all, retaining all current content on the drive.
I don’t know if this is actually what that KB article is referring to though as the information on there is a bit vague. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone is considering wiping a HDD with a format option when a more suitable alternative might be available…
That said, as your drive is still not being recognised, it sounds like another problem entirely. Are you sure the USB port on the WD player works? I bought a new Xtreamer player and one of the USB ports on that is broken - it could be something as simple as that, perhaps?
Finally, you might try powering it all down and re-starting, then just leaving the drive connected for a while. It sounds like your drive is mostly empty but still - leaving it a little while to connect might help.
I’m nowhere near as well-versed in the workings of the WD player as the other contributors on here by the way - I’m just mentioning similar things I’ve encountered along the way that ended up being resolved satisfactorily.
tedtd wrote:
Sorry I got here too late regarding this matter
Instead of formatting a HDD, one can use the ‘CONVERT’ command to change the format from FAT32 to NTFS without losing stored content.
I’ve done this before and had no problems/issues at all, retaining all current content on the drive.
I don’t know if this is actually what that KB article is referring to though as the information on there is a bit vague. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone is considering wiping a HDD with a format option when a more suitable alternative might be available…
That said, as your drive is still not being recognised, it sounds like another problem entirely. Are you sure the USB port on the WD player works? I bought a new Xtreamer player and one of the USB ports on that is broken - it could be something as simple as that, perhaps?
Finally, you might try powering it all down and re-starting, then just leaving the drive connected for a while. It sounds like your drive is mostly empty but still - leaving it a little while to connect might help.
I’m nowhere near as well-versed in the workings of the WD player as the other contributors on here by the way - I’m just mentioning similar things I’ve encountered along the way that ended up being resolved satisfactorily.
You are correct that the convert command does change the format but this was not the reason for re-formatting the drive. If you read the article you will see it says: On some WD Elements Desktop drives the original formatting is slightly different from what the WD TV expects. That is why the formatting was suggested. Nothing to do with fat32 to ntfs.
No i don’t think there is anything wrong with the any of the devices… it could be a firmware issue I am using a beta test 01.03.41
The HD works perfectly when connected to a PC
The WD TV Live recognizes my other WD Elements 1.5 TB disk
It is only when i connect my 2 TB disk to the WD TV Live… then i have the problems…
and as written above… i have reformatted the DISK (NTFS Default) on Windows XP SP3
Still when connected to the WD TV Live nothing happends… the Disk starts to blink a few times… but nothing on the WD TV Live…
Update: Just saw they uploded a new beta firmware… must try this one… will inform if it helps…
double-post deleted
richUK wrote:
You are correct that the convert command does change the format but this was not the reason for re-formatting the drive. If you read the article you will see it says: On some WD Elements Desktop drives the original formatting is slightly different from what the WD TV expects. That is why the formatting was suggested. Nothing to do with fat32 to ntfs.
That’s why I wrote what I did; reading the article doesn’t really indicate what the problem is, although I guess WD must work with FAT32 drives too, so maybe I was supposed to infer that from the writeup?
This means that - as I do/did not know previously - formatting a drive under NTFS can still be done in different ways. As you may have noticed, I have a similar problem and this reason might be the cause of it, especially seeing as another poster has managed to connect the HDD successfully (to the point of it recognising the HDD, that is) so I’d like to learn more on that score.
You might try with a full format (I guess you’ve performed the quick one) – beware, it takes looong time, but it’s worth a try.
I’m pretty sure firmware upgrade won’t help.
Cocovanna
If this reply is in response to my posts on this thread, I just used the HDD out of the box, as it were. It was formatted NTFS but I wasn’t aware there were different kinds of NTFS formatting.
If I am to try this, what command line do I need to type please?
Thanks.
I don’t know about command line switches, but if you go into Disk Management (Control Panel – Administrative Tools - Computer Management) you will be given the option as to what size “Allocation Unit” to use.
I believe you need to switch from 4k to 512 for your format for the drive to be recognized.
Thanks, RoofingGuy.
I’m looking out for a utility that will convert rather than format - it appears possible but the first program I’ve tried doesn’t recognise the disk drive either lol!
If all else fails I’ll give the re-format a try. The poster who originally said the drive would be recognised but the files wouldn’t play has never followed up on that, unfortunately, so it’s certainly no guarantee of success even if the conversion works.
Thanks for your pointer anyway - much appreciated, and hopefully it will work 
Actually, one thing I do need to confirm - using chkdsk utility, the bytes per sector are listed as 4,096k. The “512” you refer to - is that just ‘bytes’ and not ‘kb’? I ask because that partition program I tried had a 512bytes option but not 512kb, if that makes sense/sounds plausible.
Those are the choices I get for a format. 4096 would be the “4K” from my previous post. I’m not quite sure what the 4096K (i.e. 4MB) number that you’re getting from chkdsk is all about.
But yes, they’re bytes. The same 512-byte option as your other format program.
Oops. Sorry - it’s 4,096 bytes, so that checks out after all.
The thing is, while I was researching this earlier, the advice I was reading seemed geared towards it being better to have larger sectors the bigger the media you were storing ie use small sectors for web pages and text files etc storage.
That didn’t mesh well with media storage so got me a little concerned I was looking at the wrong thing in effectively making the sectors smaller on the HDD.
Thanks again for the continued input. I’ll report back as to how things change once I’ve changed the format. I’m still looking to convert first though, so it won’t be anything immediate.
