I can't acess the harddrive or folders inside the harddrive when I hook it up to my computer

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Help,

When I hook my wd up to my computer to transfer a whole folder, I cant access the hard drive.

I see it listed under devices and printer as the picture of wd tv live hub box

I see it listed twice under my network and one of them says in use, but all you get when you right click is the website page on both of these.

It is not listed in my computer like my regular external hard drive is.

Why cant I open the hard drive when connected to my computer to view my folders and contents and drag and drop a file on to the hard drive? The device isnt listed when I open a folder and hit send to…and nothing.

how can I access the hard drive to put my files on it>? I dont want to to streaming over my pc…please help!

2

If I am understanding you correctly, you cannot do what you are attempting. The HUB is not like a USB drive that you can attach to your computer. It’s essentialy another computer, so designed to be accessed across your network from your other machines. Your other option is to use an external USB drive, copy file from your computer to it, and then move that to your hub and either sync or copy the files.

Why not copy files over your network to the HUB? It is a bit slow, but it works.

Good luck.

-P

3

I hooked it up to my computer when i first got it, i used a usb cable and a wirelless device that acess my router to get internet connection. but it appeared as a pc monitor icon in my network folder and i was able to create folders and drop the files in the hard drive. Now the icon is the media one twice, i read others had this problem as well. If its not the pc monitor icon then you cant acess the hard drive. So trying to find out why its not recognizing the pc icon.

4

Okay, still a bit confused, but I’ll give it a go.

If you had the HUB with a wireless dongle in one USB, and either a USB cable or and HDMI cable connected to your computer, I am guessing that the HUB was acting like a computer on your network and that the wired connection between them was doing nothing. That would be why you saw the HUB in your Network Folder. The HUB was just another network device, and when you copied files to it, they went out of your PC network card, to your router, and then across your wireless to the HUB. The connection between the PC and the HUB would be doing nothing, and of course you cannot configure the HUB because you are not attached to a TV to see the interface.

Perhaps I am missunderstanding, but this setup does not sound like it will work, at least not properly. You dont need to connect your HUB to your computer. You just need to connect your hub to your WiFi network, and see it in your network folder on your computer.

If you cannot see the HUB this way, there are all sorts of things you could check, but you need to be connected to a TV so you can see the HUBs interface. When the HUB is connected to your TV, you can check if the HUB is actually online, and that you have all your devices set to be in the same workgroup etc.

Read the below thread where a person is asking how to hook a HUB directly to a computer and see the replies.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-General/connect-USB-to-USB/m-p/148874/highlight/true#M7335

You can also search for “Direct connecti HUB to PC” and you will see similar answers

Unplug your LiveHUB from your PC, connect it to your network and your TV, and see where you get from there. If you cannot get it working at that point, then it’s time to start troubleshooting your network connectivity. At least you will be setup in a standard configuration that people here may be able to help you with.

Good luck

-P

5

Thanks Pearl, I had no idea this was going to be nothing like a normal external hard drive! 

I appreciate your help, I understand the method you were talking about, I just read an article online on how to do that, but he gave one more piece of info by typing //wdtvlivehub in the my computer box, i havent tried this yet. 

http://www.consumingexperience.com/2011/03/western-digital-wd-tv-live-hub-media.html

See when I first got it, I thought it worked like a external hard drive, you plug it in with a usb and drop and load your files.

Well I hooked it up brand new to my computer to get my files on it before connecting to television. I knew it wasnt a wifi device so i bought a wifi device that hooks up a bridge from the wd tv live to the router. Okay so then i hooked this up to my computer using a usb or an ethernet, not sure. but when i connected it, i looked for the device and it was under network but it showed up as a computer in the computer section not media devices. It had a pc monitor icon next to my computers icon, so it read it like a computer not a media device. But now it appears as media only.

I did not know you could leave it hooked up to tv and transfer over copied files, I thought it was just for streaming and noit actually put on the hard drive. Again i thought it was like a normal hard drive but had wifi streaming. Im not so good with this new device. Im used to a 1 tb external hard drive like wd passport, but it was wifi and we could stream movies off it on the pc but had to hook up by usb to tv to watch. Something new to kearn. Thank you for your hekp!

6

Glad you got it down now, and hopefuly the hard part is over. Since you do have an external USB drive, if you are moving lots of data, say to fill the whole TB on the HUB, it may be faster to copy the files to the external drive, and then move that over to one of the HUB USB ports and either just run it like that, or copy the files to the internal drive.

Now with all that said, you really dont have any reason to move the files at all if your computer and your Live HUB are on the same network. The HUB can connect to windows (SAMBA) shares on your PC an play those files. I have all my media both music and video, on a Windows7 PC, and just let the HUB read them from that machine across the network. Perhaps that is the easiest way for you to set this up. Its a personal choice, and depends on how your home network is setup. By running the existing files from your PC, that would save you all the space on the HUB for more stuff. Lots of decisions to make, but that is one of the great things about the product, you have a lot of options. If you have questions about how to connect to shares on your windows machine, there are lots of great posts on that in this forum as well as a reasonably good section in the manual.

Good luck and welcome to the community

-P

7

Okay I know what the problem is!!!

I want to post in case someone else is having this problem.

1st. Connecting  the wd unit to my computer with ethernet cable or by usb with a wifi connection from a wifi enabled device is the same as connecting it to to a tv with a wifi enabled device. They both show up under network except for me I was not recieving the wd live hub under my network as a computer device but a media device. You should see a wd tv live icon as a monitor icon next your computer under networks. If you dont then i know why!

When I went to my settings on the wd device hooked up to my tv, I was messing with setting up the network. I did the test and everything checked out, except it had only one computer to connect to, which is my kids computer not mine! 

My kids computer is a desktop thats directly hooked up to the router. We have two more computers that are desktop but are wireless and just uses the router over wifi. 

So I look up the network on the kids computer and guess what? It was there! So the wd device has chosen my kids computer to run off and not.mine. The kids pc has the computer monitor icon plus the media icons which mine displays only the media icons.

So if you dont have that monitor icon that says wd tv then you cant open and view your folders. now I have to figure out how to get my computer to be recognized on the wd tv device. For now I am just going to hook up my external transcend hard drive to the kids computer and copy and paste into my wd tv live hard drive. All you need to do to access these folders is to click on the monitor icon and it will open and show your folders so you can edit them or change names, create folders etc.

8

You can try this as maybe it’s about what you had initially done:

 I leave my Hub’s network settings on Automatic ALL the time. So if yours are set to MANUAL change it to AUTOMATIC before you remove it from the TV do not change anything else. When you’re done hook back up to the TV and go back to manual. I connect my Hub to my computer with a standard piece of cat5. No need for a crossover cable as I think the Hub determines that or maybe my NIC is doing it. At any rate all I do is just remove it from my entertainment center, bring it to the PC, insert a short cat5 cable into the PC’s NIC and to the Hub and then access it just like when it’s on my network. Transfer speeds, if I recall correctly, are about 8MB.

9

Hey Thanks guys for the help!

Oh and one last thing

If you have a hard time viewing them in the videos tab,  go to the files its between rss and setup but make sure its selectec under local under select content source… its the red button in the middle in the upper right hand corner.

Another question.  do you know how to get a dvd picture insteat of the title?