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WD TV + Mac OS Extended hard drive - help!

dannster

dannster

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 10, 2008
133
0
London, UK
Hi guys!

I became so frustrated with Apple TV's lack of compatibility that I bought the Western Digital TV! I have a 1TB external hard drive with 300GB of video on and the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended.

I plugged the external hard drive into the WD TV and it wouldn't load! Does the drive have to be MS-DOS (FAT)? Can I partition the drive into half Mac OS Extended and the other half MS-DOS (FAT) without losing any of the data on the drive already??

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!
 
TEG

TEG

macrumors 604
Jan 21, 2002
6,621
169
Langley, Washington
I do believe the drive has to be in FAT32 or NTFS to work. Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any utility, other than the BootCamp utility that will allow you to repartition with out you loosing your data. I would back everything up, and try it, if it doesn't work, they you'll have to do FAT32 on your own and loose everything. You should not use NTFS because it is not directly compatible with OS X, but remember that there is a 2GB file size limit on FAT32 disks.

TEG
 
K

KevinC867

macrumors 6502a
Jun 8, 2007
620
2
Saratoga, CA
dannster said:
Hi guys!

I became so frustrated with Apple TV's lack of compatibility that I bought the Western Digital TV! I have a 1TB external hard drive with 300GB of video on and the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended.

I plugged the external hard drive into the WD TV and it wouldn't load! Does the drive have to be MS-DOS (FAT)? Can I partition the drive into half Mac OS Extended and the other half MS-DOS (FAT) without losing any of the data on the drive already??

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!
Click to expand...

The WDTV definitely does support Mac OS Extended (HFS+) drives. Journaled HFS+ formatting is also OK, but the WDTV does not provide the "Media Library" features with a journaled drive. No big loss unless you intend to hack your WDTV to support networking as the WDLXTV software seems to require the Media Library features to be turned on to get the extended features.

Keep in mind that if there is a lot of stuff on the drive, it can take the WDTV a while to scan all the media before it "mounts" the drive.
 
dannster

dannster

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 10, 2008
133
0
London, UK
KevinC867 said:
The WDTV definitely does support Mac OS Extended (HFS+) drives. Journaled HFS+ formatting is also OK, but the WDTV does not provide the "Media Library" features with a journaled drive. No big loss unless you intend to hack your WDTV to support networking as the WDLXTV software seems to require the Media Library features to be turned on to get the extended features.

Keep in mind that if there is a lot of stuff on the drive, it can take the WDTV a while to scan all the media before it "mounts" the drive.
Click to expand...

Ahhh ok, well it was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but I disabled journaled so it's just Mac OS Extended now. When I plugged in the drive the USB light on the WD TV was flashing, maybe that indicated it was scanning the drive before it mounted and I'm just being impatient? lol
 
D

donkeyduzdallas

macrumors newbie
Oct 6, 2009
1
0
HDD Journaled issues

Hi Guys,

I feel like I'm bumping my head against a brick wall - maybe someone can help - I too have the WD TV and a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) HDD, but I can't seem to disable the "journaled" part. Have tried everything in the disk utility (including using the option key when clicking on file) to get the disable option to appear, but with no luck. Anyone have any advice?

Going crazy here!...
 
K

KevinC867

macrumors 6502a
Jun 8, 2007
620
2
Saratoga, CA
donkeyduzdallas said:
Hi Guys,

I feel like I'm bumping my head against a brick wall - maybe someone can help - I too have the WD TV and a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) HDD, but I can't seem to disable the "journaled" part. Have tried everything in the disk utility (including using the option key when clicking on file) to get the disable option to appear, but with no luck. Anyone have any advice?

Going crazy here!...
Click to expand...

The only way I know of is to reformat the drive with Disk Utility [Erase] and select "Mac OS Extended" instead of "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" as the Volume Format. Of course, that will require copying your media to another drive, then copying it back.

I didn't think it was possible to simply switch off journaling, but I'd love to know if I'm wrong.
 
A

angusmcfisher

macrumors regular
Dec 18, 2009
122
16
dannster said:
Ahhh ok, well it was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but I disabled journaled so it's just Mac OS Extended now. When I plugged in the drive the USB light on the WD TV was flashing, maybe that indicated it was scanning the drive before it mounted and I'm just being impatient? lol
Click to expand...

Just incase there are any other people who are reading this with the same issue, this is common and is not a fault. When there is a significant change in the drive, the WD doesn't mount it until it has rescanned your hard drive and put the information into its internal database... Having a 2tb hard drive, I've sometimes had to wait a very long time!
 
T

TheZA

macrumors regular
Sep 14, 2007
174
0
I have a WD Passport drive formatted in HFS+ (no journaling) and it works fine with WDTV. It could be my imagination, but I think it is faster to load than another WD Passport I have formatted in FAT32. I turned the media library off on the WDTV because that was taking significant time and had some little problems. All my media is pretty well organized in files so it makes it easy to navigate that way.
 
I

ioannisss

macrumors newbie
Dec 23, 2009
1
0
My Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Passport is fully compatible with WDTV.
Every video or music file is playable like my NTFS Passport. :)
 
K

KevinC867

macrumors 6502a
Jun 8, 2007
620
2
Saratoga, CA
ioannisss said:
My Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Passport is fully compatible with WDTV.
Every video or music file is playable like my NTFS Passport. :)
Click to expand...

Yes, journaled drives definitely work. However, the "Media Library" feature of the WDTV can't be enabled with this drive format (unless this has been changed with a recent firmware update).

As I said previously, losing the Media Library feature is no big loss unless you intend to hack your WDTV with the WDLXTV firmware. However, now that networking is available in the WDTV Live player, I would recommend forgetting that hack and just getting a new box.
 
M

msugarpants

macrumors member
Jan 4, 2005
37
0
Really? journaled drives work with WDTV? How?

I have the latest firmware and WDTV Live. I have 4 hard drives, 3 of which are 'journaled', all connected to my airport router. The same error message comes up as the rest of you mention. Then you guys go on to say journaled drives DO work. How is that? I would love to know because I am ready to sell my WDTV to the highest bidder. I cant find any of my files anywhere on the WDTV. Can someone with knowledge post the directions to access their media library? Those four hard drives total 4.5 TB. THANKS
 
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