Philips DVP5990 Picky About Flash Drives?

[slomojoe]

I just bought a Philips DVP5990. I had the idea to put all my kid's DVD's on a flash drive since they seem to destroy DVD's pretty quickly. Trouble is, I can't seem to find a high-capacity drive that will work with my player.
I have an ancient 1GB Sony flash drive. I copied my Divx rip of my kid's Cars DVD to it, plugged it in, and it plays fine. I copy that same file to my 8Gb Sandisk Cruzer (I removed the U3 software to maximize space and remove cruft). I can browse all over the drive (it's also got my personal files on it) but when I select the Cars file, the file browser blinks off, then returns. No loading progress or anything. Right back to the browser.
So I figured U3 screwed it up or something so last nite I went to Best Buy and bought their cheapest 8Gb drive (Geek Squad branded ), copy the same Cars file to it, and the player will not even recognize the drive. As a matter of fact, it will lock up solid. I can't play a DVD or turn the player off without pulling the plug out of the wall.
All of the drives are formatted FAT32. I was suspicious of the Best Buy drive, so I used gparted to create a new partition table and FAT32 primary partition. No dice. All these drives work fine on the 3 computers I've tried them on.
Has anyone else seen problems with different brands of drive or have I got a defective player?
TIA

[handyguy]

Mine all work just fine. Why not try another video file?

[jagabo]

Try repartitioning the drive with a single, primary, active boot partition. And yes, it's necessary to remove the U3 software completely. Including removing the hidden partition.

[slomojoe]

@handyguy: I tried another Divx file. Same result. The 1Gb plays fine. The 8Gb Sandisk Cruzer displays the file browser but will not play the video and the 8Gb GeekSquad drive locks up the player completely.

@jagabo: As I mentioned before, I removed the U3 software and repartitioned the Cruzer. It has the same amount of space as the GeekSquad drive, which was blank when I bought it. I took the GeekSquad drive and wiped it, including the partition table. Created a new primary partition and made it bootable. Same result. Locks up the drive.

Since it sounds like this is pretty exceptional, I'm going to try exchanging the player.

[jagabo]

It sounds like you did everything right. You could also try using SwissKnife to format the drive. That seems to work when the Windows format utility doesn't.

[redwudz]

I would also recommend trying SwissKnife. Windows does a poor job of formating drives to FAT32 in my experience.

[slomojoe]

Windows does a poor job of formating drives to FAT32 in my experience.

I know XP will not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB. Found that out the hard way. I've had good luck with GParted. Since all these drives work with the 3 comptuers I have access to, I'm pretty sure it's not the drives or the way they're set up (crossing my fingers).

[slomojoe]

Well, there goes that theory. I returned the original player and got a new DVP5990 and it has the exact same issues: plays a file on the 1Gb, will not play on the 8Gb Cruzer, and locks up with the GeekSquad 8Gb. I guess I'll hunt down some other brand flash drives and see if I can find one that works.

[jagabo]

I have a TDK 8 GB flash drive that's working fine. You should really try the SwissKnife format utility.

[sambat]

I have the same Philips player and use a Kingston 8GB drive without issues.

[slomojoe]

I had another really cheap 8GB drive (I believe made by Transcend), but I had Ubuntu installed on it so it was non-trivial to move my data and get it back to FAT32, but when I did, the drive worked fine. I don't know why this drive works and the other 2 8Gb drives don't. Like I said, they work fine on a computer (I installed Ubuntu to the 8Gb Geek Squad drive and it's humming along).
Maybe I'll try SwissKnife a try and see if it makes a difference.