"Media Drive Is Not Responding" problem

I’m having a troublesome problem with my Media Drive and I’m not finding anyone else with this issue on here. I can’t play a video longer than 10 minutes before my Android App says the “media drive is not responding” and stops playing the video, then it doesn’t work again until I reboot the Media Drive. I get the same erorr message if I try to go back into the App before I reboot the Media Drive, so the only way to clear it is to reboot. I also have this same problem even if I let the Media Drive sit there on for a while with no connections (with the wifi still running.) The wifi light stays on even after this message appears, so I’m not sure where the failure is coming from.

We’ve owned this device for a couple years now, but we only use it when we’re traveling, so it’s been a couple of months since we’ve used this last. When I plugged this in this time I was told there was a firmware update so I updated it to 3.04 and I’m guessing it has something to do with that update. I’ve tried factory resetting but that doesn’t help.

Anyone have any idea what is causing this problem? This pretty much makes this device a partial brick since it’s not a realiable connection anymore. :confused:

i have the latest FW and no such problem. Maybe try a factory reset on the WMD and see if the issue is still present. 

Sorry, I forgot to mention in my original post that I did the factory reset but it didn’t solve anything. I’m wondering if this was a bad firmware upgrade (not the firmware itself, just that the device didn’t take it well.)

I tried to put the firmware file back on the device hoping it would reinstall it, but it doesn’t because it’s the same version number. Not sure how to force it to reinstall. If I put the previous version file in there will it downgrade?

I dont think the media drive can be downgraded. The app will see the file is the latest version is on the drive and tell you the FW is up to date. Try contacting sandisk support and see if this would be covered by the warranty. 

Ok problem solved! It’s an odd one so thanks for reading this long response…

After your last message I contacted live chat customer support and was talking to them for almost an hour. Sadly they weren’t much help. I felt like I was forcing them to lead me in fixing this thing instead of the other way around. Thankfully I’m techie enough where I was able to do so without much issue, but it was still frustrating that they couldn’t help. Their final words were for me to format everything, including the memory card, and start over and see if that worked.

I backed up the videos off of the main harddrive on the device and took out the memory card all together. Why format when I could just pop that out? Anyway, I turned on the app to get into the drive’s settings to format it, when I noticed something. I had 10 videos on the main harddrive (noticed this when I backed up the files on my desktop), but up to this point only 3 were being detected by the device. Once I took out the memory card, all of a sudden all videos were listed off of the main drive. This put me back in “fix it” mode and I ran a test with the same video I was having problems with.

The video played all the way through! No stopping 10-12 mins in. So it was the memory card… ok, that narrows things down…

I then back up all files off the memory card and delete everything on it. I pop the memory card back in and play the same video. No problems. Ok, so it’s a problem with a file on the card. I then had to move 5 files at a time back onto the memory card, then play the video each time, which means I played the video for 15-20 mins every time, so this took me all day to figure this out. Oy.

Anyway, the problem file? An mp3. I have NO idea why a mp3 file was causing my problem, especially a file I was not even playing. In fact, my test video was on the main drive and this mp3 was on the memory card. I have no idea how a file sitting there would cause problems with ALL other files on the device. Makes. No. Sense. The filename of the mp3 didn’t contain odd characters either, it was all acceptable characters.

So now that that file is gone everything works great like it did before. Hopefully this is the last of this, if it comes back again later then I’ll investigate whether the memory card has a bad sector on it and see if that’s the cause.

Thanks for reading!

That is a pretty strang issue. Glad you found a solution and thanks for updating!