Mass Media & Technology

Samsung not Reading HDD

Recognises drive but wont play anything (January 2020)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
NL
Ne1L C
Hi

I've placed all my media files on a WD My Passport External HDD. I've plugged it in to my Samsung le32450e1w xxu TV. It will read to hdd but not play any files. Its the same when I try and play them through Kodi.

I've formatted the drive with NTFS.

Can anyone help?

Thanks
DV
DVB Cornwall
Couple of potential issues and resulting questions .....

Do Samsung with their cutdown operating system on their TVs .....

1. Have a maximum number of permissable files on each HDD? If so are you exceeding this? and/or
2. Similarly does their OS limit the permissable size of HDD that can be used? If so is your WDMP greater than this?
NL
Ne1L C
Its a 2TB drive
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Can Windows read it?
NL
Ne1L C
Mac and Chromebook can.

For the record my TV is about 8 years old.
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Yes but that's not what I asked.

NTFS is not "unique" to Windows but it originated there. Macs can only read NTFS I believe out of the box, not write to it, and the Chromebook will usually only do it to exFAT or at most FAT32.

Considering neither of those operating systems can format NTFS drives, you must have access to Windows. I repeat: Can WIndows read your drive or not?
NL
Ne1L C
I havent tried windows yet
Last edited by Ne1L C on 31 January 2020 10:25pm
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
So how did you format it NTFS then if you don't have Windows?
Mac is read-only NTFS. Chromebook defaults to FAT32.
Most other operating systems are read-only to NTFS formatted drives with a few exceptions, but the two you've listed are not exceptions.

Or do you really mean that the drive was already formatted for NTFS when you bought it and you've just plugged it in and dumped a load of files on it? Chromebook will let you do that I believe, it just won't format it as NTFS.
DA
davidhorman
It will read to hdd but not play any files. Its the same when I try and play them through Kodi.


Just to be absolutely clear, it shows you the files on the drive? If so, what happens you try to play one? What's the source of the files?
NL
Ne1L C
I used a program called “Tuxera for NTFS” to format it. It was a program I’d used before to format a previous HDD for the Samsung
NL
Ne1L C
It will read to hdd but not play any files. Its the same when I try and play them through Kodi.


Just to be absolutely clear, it shows you the files on the drive? If so, what happens you try to play one? What's the source of the files?


This is what it says
File manager...pnhub...home

In the past with a previous hdd it then showed the categories.

This time there’s nothing there
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
When you formatted a drive last time in your software of Tuxera and plugged it into a TV did it work then? Or is this the first time you're doing this?

I'm wondering if the TV is expecting a certain file format which may or may not be NTFS.

The easiest solution to the problem could be probably not doing it as an external drive over USB. A NAS drive could be better because that solves all the filesystem isssues which don't exist over a network.

Note that you don't need an actual NAS drive as such because something like a Raspberry Pi can do a similar thing, but an actual NAS would provide more flexibility as if you rip more media at a later date (ie you buy a new DVD or something) you can just squirt it to the network drive and then do whatever you do to reduce the file size if that's what you do.

Newer posts