Trouble connecting external drive to LCD TV

[Han Solo1]

I am having trouble connecting a STBV3000100 external drive to the HDTV (LG42LH50). I get an error message stating "Problem on the USB device. Please check USB." The USB cord is "style 2725 VW-1 30V Super High Speed USB Revision 3.0". I am assuming that I may need to get a different type of USB cord or an adapter of some sort. I also assuming that the HDTV can't handle more than USB 2.0. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[jman98]

Could be lots of things causing your problem.

USB 3.0 is almost certainly not going to be supported, but it should downgrade to 2.0 and work.

The enclosure for your disk drive may not have its own power source and the USB port on the TV may not have sufficient power to drive a large disk drive. You have a 3 TB drive. Get a powered enclosure if you don't have one already.

3 TB drives may not be supported at all. You'll need to see the specs on the TV.

Could be issues with the format on the disk drive. The TV may only support FAT32 and the drive may be in NTFS format.

[Han Solo1]

It's not the format. I've had NTFS formatted 2 TB drives function with the HDTV.

[aedipuss]

it's not a cable or usb3 problem. check the tv manual, it probably can't read anything except fat32 format. and most likely a non-mbr gpt drive like that is not going to work.

[Han Solo1]

Apparently, I got it to work. It had to do with the size. It seems the HDTV can't handle any HDD more than 2TB nor matter any of it's properties. So I partitioned it and all media was able to play on the HDTV. But now I need to delete an unallocated volume for which I'm not able to do. Any idea?

[fritzi93]

Your TV simply doesn't recognize a GPT partitioned volume. Not surprising. As you found out, you have to use the old standard MBR partitioning, which has a size limit of 2 TB. I'm pretty sure you can use the latest Seagate DiscWizard software to partition the remaining space. But I'd start over with two MBR partitions using DiscWizard. One of 2 TB, one for the remaining space.

[aedipuss]

do you think it might work if it was gpt partitioned into 2 1.5tb drives?

[fritzi93]

I've been meaning to try it with my LG TV and test out various combinations. There was a good deal a couple days ago for a 3 TB WD drive on Newegg, but I let it slide.

I've read numerous postings here and there on the subject (AVS, Tom's, Seven Forums etc.). Both in regard to TVs and BD standalones. It seems there's no support for GPT volumes, or at minimum nothing over 2 TB will be recognized. I strongly suspect the former, but confess I dunno..yet. Again, supposedly Seagate's DiscWizard can do the job of creating two MBR partitions on a 3 TB drive.

Anyway, I have a couple 2 TB ntfs partitioned powered external drives that work fine with my TV. Running out of space though.

[fritzi93]

Alright, I got a Seagate 3 TB drive, put it in an external enclosure and had a go with my LG 65LW6500 and LG BD670 standalone.

It's just not happening.

1) Single 3 TB GPT partition. Not recognized.
2) Two GPT partitions, both under 2 TB. Not recognized.

Here's where it gets interesting. I re-initialized the drive as MBR with the latest Seagate DiscWizard and then created a partition in Windows (Win7 64 bit). Then using the Seagate Extended Capacity Manager, I allocated the remainder of the drive. This showed up in Windows Disc Management as if it was a separate physical drive. No problem creating a new partition. Put a video file on each and tried that with my HTPC. Fine, I can access both partitions.

Now, to the point of the whole exercise:

3) Two MBR partitions. Only the first partition was recognized by my TV and standalone.

So, unless or until support is added for GPT partitions, it seems there's no way around the 2 TB limit. I suspect this is true for all other makes of TVs and standalones as well.

I went ahead and re-initialized/re-partitioned as a single 3 TB GPT partition. Then swapped out a 2 TB (MBR) drive from my HTPC to use in the enclosure instead.

[EDIT] BTW, reading the reviews on this drive was hilarious. Reviewers maxing out their tech level, then saying they were ripped off because the drive is actually on 2.72 TB.



Or the XP 32-bit users complaining about drive after drive being DOA.

[[_chef_]]

[EDIT] BTW, reading the reviews on this drive was hilarious. Reviewers maxing out their tech level, then saying they were ripped off because the drive is actually on 2.72 TB.



Or the XP 32-bit users complaining about drive after drive being DOA.

Yeah, its sometimes very amusing to read such "hitecher" reviews.

[Han Solo1]

Well the drive finally seems to work. This happened some time ago. I simply formatted the partition containing media via windows. I still get the "Problem on the USB device. Please check USB" message but it seems to play files. Also as noted before this drive was always an NTFS. I also used MiniTool Partition in order to resize partitions.