[HELP] Philips DVP5990 and WD Passport Problems

[atoria]

I have been trying to get one of my two WD passports to work with my Philips DVP5990. I have them both in FAT32 format done with the FAT32 formatter on http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/. I also have 2 Philips DVD players so I know that the player is not the problem.

[Hard drive #1: Passport Essential 750GB Essential SE]
When it connects it brings up the screen that's "supposed" to have all my folders but instead shows everything as "empty".

[Hard drive #2: Passport Elite 500GB]
When it connects it powers on but it eventually comes up with an error message saying "device not supported".

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am at the end of my rope here! Thank you!

[MJA]

I own both.the 5990,and 250gb passport with no issues.try to format the drive with SwissKnife V3.22

if you are running vista. run the program as administrator

do u have any issues with thumb/flash drives ?

[jman98]

I don't own any external disk drives, but from looking at the WD webpage it seems that the passport disks don't have their own power source and expect to get power via USB. It's not well known, but most DVD players that support external drives can't provide enough power via USB for a disk drive. They can power a thumb drive, but any external disk drive will need it's own power source. I strongly doubt that you will ever success until you get an external drive with it's own power source. I do not expect SwissKnife to solve your problem.

[MJA]

The 5990 does provide enough juice to power any extremal hard-drive based on the 2.5 ",but not the 3.5"

[handyguy]

Search forums for '5990' lots of HD topics you can read & pick up an idea or two.

[ipse]

Or better...turf this POS altogether. Trust me...not worth the time spent to troubleshoot it. It's flacky.

[Squash]

atoria,
Is your Passport one of those new ones with the micro USB cable and the SmartWare software? If so, Western Digital released a software patch back in November that may help.

A friend of mine had one these drives. Along with the normal drive, it also installed a virtual CD drive, much like the U3 flash drives have. After I saw that, and that he couldn't get rid of the CD drive or the backup software, I went out and bought one of the old-style WD Passports, which is a drive I like (I have 4 of them). I knew I wanted no part of these new drives.

If that's your drive, check out the Amazon reviews on it:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Passport-Essential-WDBABM7500ABK-NESN/dp/B002OB4...2626414&sr=8-8
25 of the 55 reviews give it 1 star out of 5. There's a good reason for that.

I was looking it up on there because your post reminded me of that friend's drive. I saw that some people there on Amazon are saying that WD released a patch on Nov. 19 allowing you to get rid of the virtual CD. I don't know if this will help with your playback problems with the 5990 but I'd think it's worth a shot.

edit: here's a link for the 500 GB model, looks like the same problems on it:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Passport-Essential-WDBAAA5000ASL-NESN/dp/B002KCA...2626414&sr=8-9

another edit: I was lookiing at the horrible reviews on Newegg and a guy gave the link to WD's update:
http://www.westerndigital.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdsmartware