Mini does not recognise harddrive Options

[hillbilly]

G'day all,

I have had my mini for about a week now but I am unable to get the mini to recognise the WD Elements HD when it is formatted as HFS+ with journalling disabled. If I format the HD as Fat32 the mini will recognise and play the movies. If I format it as two partitions, one as Fat32 and one as HFS+ it will recognise both partitions. However, when the HD is a single partition as HFS+ the mini does not see it and the screen just says, 'please insert a USB drive'. I have also upgraded the firmware but the problem persists.

Can anyone please help with this.

Yes, I am using a mac.

Thanks, Hillbilly

[WDUser]

Try the hard reset button if the player has one (see manual for more), else there should be a soft reset option under Settings somewhere.

The FAQ on the WD site says:

The WD TV Mini Media Player supports NTFS, FAT32, HFS, and HFS+ file systems for media playback.

So you can try plain ol' HFS if it's still possible to format using that option. However, since you're using a WD HDD to boot, I recommend you contact WD Support and ask them what's wrong. (And if they manage to solve the issue, do let us know as well.)

[hillbilly]

Thanks for the reply,

I have already been in contact with WD support, their advice was to reformat the HD again as sometimes you need to format them more than once... sounds like dodgey advice to me! Their next step was to update the firmware which i have done but still no luck. The firmware upgrade also resets the player. So still not sure what to do. I have replied to Wd support regarding the firmware upgrade and for further advice so will post here if I have any luck.

But if anyone has more advice please let me know.

Thanks

[cam8001]

I am in the exact same situation, and I can't get the Mini to recognise my HFS+ formatted WD Elements drive. I'll report in if I figure out a way around it.

[JanneManne]

Hi,

I have a similar problem. Got my WD TV Mini yesterday. Latest firmware was already installed. I am using Mac OS 10.6.
My HFS+ formatted WD 1TB drive (non-journaled) could not be recognized as 1 partition. However, I did partition it into two, one HFS+ and one FAT. I put a different file into each partition, the only one recognized by the system was the FAT partition........

I do not have a windows machine to format the WD 1TB drive into NTFS. 4GB limit in FAT is not OK...

Suggestions are welcome

[WDUser]

The only product I know of (haven't used it myself though) that claims to be able to create NTFS partitions under Mac OS X is this. I highly recommend connecting to a Windows machine for a few minutes however and doing the job on an OS that supports the file system natively. As for these multiple reports of the Mini not recognising WD drives, I recommend you ask WD Support to explain exactly why this is (and if they do, let us know as well). After all, it's their own drive and so if an incompatibility exists, however shameful it must be publicly acknowledged by them.

[JanneManne]

I decided to do a NTFS formatting on a friends windows computer.
Then I downloaded MacFUSE and NTFS-3G-2010.5.22 (both are free versions) to be able to write to a NTFS formatted drive from Mac OS 10.6. The WD 1 TB is now recognised by the WD TV mini. Everthing seems to work...... fingers crossed

[WDUser]

Hmm... I thought NTFS might work. Still, the fact that non-journaled HFS+ doesn't work despite being officially supported is something that needs to be reported to WD.