WD TV Live player/WD My Book 3Tb problems

I am trying to troubleshoot a friends set up. He has a new WD TV Live (model# [Deleted]) and a WD My Book 3Tb external Hard Drive.

A couple of questions:

  1. Lets say he has several hundred videos and several thousand mp3’s and a bunch of digital pics loaded onto the hard drive…how long should the initial scan take after connecting the hard drive? I ask because the process takes forever and never seems to end.

  2. If he disconnects the hard drive and the player and moves it to another location and reassembles it will it go through the same process of scanning and take just as long as the initial scan?

  3. What is the proper procedure for shutting down this system so there is no data corruption? In looking at the manual for the hard drive it indicates that the power button on the back of the hard drive is only to be used when the hard drive is connected to a PC, so apparently the power button shouldnt be used when the is connected to the WD TV Live, right?

I fear he has corrupted the data on the hard drive because he cant get the pair to behave properly. It would seem as though this should be a no-brainer being that both products are WD, but my friend has had nothing but problems.

Any help would be appreciated.

Well this is interesting.

My friend brought me his WD My Book Essential 3Tb external hard drive and WD TV Live player.

First I tried my WD My Passport 1Tb connected to my brand new WD TV Live player. After connecting and powering up the message “compiling media library” came up with a dot, dot, dot progress bar…after about a minute everything had been scanned and all was playable, no problems.

After ejecting My Passport from the player I plugged his WD My Book Essential 3Tb into my player. The same message appeared “compiling media library” and it worked at compiling for about half a minute and then it froze. The dot, dot, dot progress meter to the right of the “compiling” message just froze. I did nothing but watch for a minute or so. After about a minute the player rebooted to the welcome screen and went to “compiling” again and eventually froze again, and then relooped around to the welcome screen. My WD TV Live player has older firmware (whatever was shipped with it when I pruchased it last week) so I thought maybe it was a problem with the older firmware.

So next I tried connecting his WD My Book Essential 3Tb drive to his WD TV Live player (with updated firmware) and the process froze at “compiling”.

So it appears that the WD My Book Essential 3Tb does not play well with the WD TV Live player.

To sum up:

My 1Tb WD Passport works with both his player with the new firmware and my player with the older firmware

His 3Tb WD My Book Essential doesnt work with either.

His 3Tb hard drive is formatted NTFS and there are no errors on the drive.

What to do?

After surfing here I have found that others have had similar problems.

I set my nephew up with a new WD TV Live player with updated firmware and a Seagate 3Tb Backup Plus…no problems

A WD 3Tb My Book nothing but problems…way to go WD, cant even get the player to work with your own hard drives.

Hire some engineers already!

For what it’s worth, I have the same combo: WD TV Live SMP and WD My Book Essential 3TB, and everything is working fine (knock wood…).  My SMP firmware is 1.12.14.  I don’t remember how the external drive is formatted, but I believe I left it as it was out of the box.