FIX: Usb Drive or External Drive cant Read or Recognize the WD TV LIve Player

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
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FIX: Usb Drive or External Drive cant Read or Recognize the WD TV LIve Player

This guide is just a simple fix if one of your Usb or External Drive cant detect the WD TV LIve Streaming Media Player.

If Formatting your USB/External Drive in Windows under My Computer wont work

You may want to try this Guide

- Do not Update your Firmware via WiFi
- Update your WD TV LIve SMP to the Latest Firmware using Wired Connection only
- After a successfull Firmware Update, do a Hard Reset by Pressing the small button Under WD TV LIve
- Prepare your Usb, you may want to back-up your files
- DownLoad and Install –> HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool
- Insert Usb to your PC
- Open HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool
- Carefully Select your Usb in Device Details and Select Continue
- In HDD LLF Low Level Format Tab, Check the Perform a Quick Wipe, Then Click Format This Device

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- After your Usb Device is Formatted, we need to repartition it first

- Close the HDD LLF Low Level Format and Open it again, Click the Disk Management Console

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- Carefully Select your Usb Device, Then rReFomat it

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- Done

- Now, You can transfer your Movie Files in your Usb/External Drive

- TURN OFF MEDIA LIBRABRY in WD Tv Live Setting
- Insert your Usb/External Drive to the WD TV LIve SMP, and it can now Read and Recognize your Device

Tips: If your WD Tv Live can now detect the Usb/External Device successfully but can’t Play one of your videos, Solution is just don’t put your Video Files inside the Folder. Move it directly inside your Usb Device, Don’t create any folder, just your Video files and the Subtitles.

1 Like
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And how did you come on this ‘fix’. Is is just something you did and it worked or is there a technical reason.

I can understand that the format bit ‘may’ have an effect but fail to see the way that you download the firmware can influence the problem.

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Last Week i bought this brand new WD TV Live Player [Gen3]
Update it to the Latest Firmware over the wifi, everything seems to be working great
Until, when i insert any of Usb Thumb Drives, it just can’t Read it or Detect it
So, I can’t watch any of my Movies
Frustation sets in, in my mind, i shouldn’t bougth this piece of Junk.

Hey, it Should have Read any kind of Usb or External Drives for the 1st place, Right?
It should be Plug and Play, So I Searched Google to Find a Solution and brought me to this site
I followed some Instruction in this site, but all FAILED!

So, I’ve Come to this Fix and sharing it to the others who had the same problem.

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@Pinoy

 

Thankyou, for taking the time to post your solution / guide for the benefit of the Community

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There’s no need to press the reset button, it can be done via menu. Wifi or wired won’t make a difference cause the update won’t start till the file has been downloaded completely. And who’s doing a low level format on their drives these days?

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Pinoy wrote:

Last Week i bought this brand new WD TV Live Player [Gen3]
Update it to the Latest Firmware over the wifi, everything seems to be working great
Until, when i insert any of Usb Thumb Drives, it just can’t Read it or Detect it
So, I can’t watch any of my Movies
Frustation sets in, in my mind, i shouldn’t bougth this piece of Junk.

Hey, it Should have Read any kind of Usb or External Drives for the 1st place, Right?
It should be Plug and Play, So I Searched Google to Find a Solution and brought me to this site
I followed some Instruction in this site, but all FAILED!

So, I’ve Come to this Fix and sharing it to the others who had the same problem.

The question is how did you ‘come’ to this fix? This is a user to user forum so you are allowed to be questioned over any information you add to the forum. That’s how users will be able to determine if its a fix or just a series of things that you strung together which happened to work.

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Exactly, and since some of his steps are weird I doubt it will.

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Pinoy wrote:

Last Week i bought this brand new WD TV Live Player [Gen3]
Update it to the Latest Firmware over the wifi, everything seems to be working great
Until, when i insert any of Usb Thumb Drives, it just can’t Read it or Detect it
So, I can’t watch any of my Movies
Frustation sets in, in my mind, i shouldn’t bougth this piece of Junk.

Hey, it Should have Read any kind of Usb or External Drives for the 1st place, Right?
It should be Plug and Play, So I Searched Google to Find a Solution and brought me to this site
I followed some Instruction in this site, but all FAILED!

So, I’ve Come to this Fix and sharing it to the others who had the same problem.

If you believe that every computer-based device (except the WD TV Live) will be able to use any data storage device, then you don’t know much about computer filesystems.  There are more than a dozen filesystems in common use, and no OS can read/write them all.  If that makes a device junk, then every computer/OS is junk–particularly Windows.  Windows can’t read the Mac OS X filesystem, any Linux filesystems, and on and on.  Heck, it can’t even deal with a USB drive that has more than one partition on it.  Talk about junk!

I would strongly urge you to educate yourself about filesystems.  The Wikipedia “file system” page is good, and I also quickly found the following on HTG:  http://www.howtogeek.com/73178/what-file-system-should-i-use-for-my-usb-drive

There are a number of reasons why the WD TV Live devices might not have handled your USB drive.  Was it formatted with MS’s new, proprietary exFAT?  The WD units don’t support that filesystem.  If you want to blame anyone for this, it should be Microsoft, since they decided to patent exFAT and try to extort more money out of computer users.  If the drive was NTFS formatted, it might not have been cleanly unmounted.  Many systems refuse to mount NTFS filesystems that are marked “dirty.”

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ok, I gotta chim in too

and first off, I don’t want to sound over negative

I appreciate the willingness to post a potential fix to help other users

and this type of activity should be encouraged

so that said

my 2cents

I’ve never personally used the HP format tool

but it’s been know to cause incompatibility will all prior WD media players

this was apparently due to the fact that it would create an incompatible hidden partition

so again, I never used the HP tool, and it apparently works above formatting a drive for use with the SMP

but it’s probablems with prior WD media players is so well documented

that it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the term “HP format tool”

:slight_smile:

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[Deleted]

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Oops, my other post were deleted

Sorry MODs, Peace!

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Out of interest from looking at the images on the post it appears that this ‘fix’ has only been used on a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade USB flash drive! You should also note that the HP format tool used is designed for use with USB flash drives. I would suggest that you procede with caution if you intend using this method on your new 2TB USB drive.

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i actually used the Application, –> Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool

HP format tool is Just my Alternative, Im editing my Post and swithching back to original Application Used

And Since there is No Update for HP format tool since 2009, it will only be used for a Usb Drive 16Gb below 

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Which you still only used on a 16GB flash drive. How many more times are you going to fiddle with this guide. This is at least the third time.

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Well, Just want to give my best Fix to share who had the same problem

As I said before if you have a 1-Click solution about this, then just Post it here.