My Book Essential 3tb External Hard Drive will not work with WD TV HD Media Player

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
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I have previously used my 1tb wd external hard drive along with my sandisk and the media player would read both fine but when I plug in my 3tb hard drive it says no files found.  When I plug in the 3tb hard drive into my computer I can see all of my files.  I have 1.5tb worth of stuff on my 3tb hard drive and promised to give someone my old one so I hope there is a way to connect the 2.  I have also tried to remove the password feature and that has not worked either (maybe I did it wrong).

Any suggestions?

Is it where the files are located?

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How is the old drive formatted? Does the media player support drives formatted using GPT instead of MRB? Drives larget than 2T need GPT.

Joe

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The WDTV HD (both Gen1 and Gen2) simply will not work with drives larger than 2TB.

If you have a Gen1 this will never be changed.

If you have a Gen2, the chances of a firmware update to fix this are slim, but not officially zero.

Only the WDTV Live, Live Plus and Live Hub can be used with drives greater than 2TB, and even then only with the latest firmware updates.

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Thanks guess I wasted $100 didn’t even cross my mind that the 2 would not be compatable.

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Ya… the issue cropped up long after production apparently stopped on the older devices.

I guess WD didn’t have the foresight to label the boxes “Warning: this device may be incompatible with something invented a year or two in the future.” :wink:

Other than actual PCs and Macs (and even then there’s remaining issues) there’s very few devices that will support single drives larger than 2TB… not just the WDTV line, but TV’s, DVD Players, etc…

People are running into this with USB enclosures too… they throw a 3TB Caviar (or Seagate) in, and it just won’t work.