Samsung USB television

BritRael

I have just bought a Samsung LCD TV. Very nice it is too
It has a built-in facility where you can plug in a USB device to view media; movies, pictures etc. When I plug in my 16gb pen drive, it works perfectly. However, when I plug in one of my USB HDD's (80-400gb)they are not detected
It does say in the instructions that 'sometimes' a USB drive (that uses an extension cable) will not be detected, but I have tried them and none work. I can get around this by simply moving a movie to the pen drive and viewing it but it's a bit of a pain having to continually do this. Has anybody had the same problem or have any ideas?
I was thinking that maybe I could buy a female to male USB adaptor so that the cable is removed from the circuit?
TIA

[Deleted User]

Is your HDD externally powered? There might not be enough juice in the USB from the TV to power it and detect it

shandypants5

I had a similar problem with my external hdd on my playstation3.

my old laptop would see it fine but my new laptop and the PS3 wouldnt see it at all.

I had to reformat the drive to FAT32 and then everything I used detected it and treated it just like a large pendrive.
(backup your data first or it will be deleted)

If you use windows7 or your drive is over 32gb then this link might help you.(the first method didnt work for me, but the method in answer 12 worked great)

Clicky

Or someone more techy may know an easier fix for you.

BritRael

ringo_24601 wrote: »

Is your HDD externally powered? There might not be enough juice in the USB from the TV to power it and detect it

Yeah, this is the problem; it is not externally powered and the TV is not giving enough to spin the HDD. A friend suggested plugging it into my laptop (to power it up) and then plugging the second USB connection into the TV. Good idea, but didn't work

BritRael

shandypants5 wrote: »

...I had to reformat the drive to FAT32 and then everything I used detected it and treated it just like a large pendrive....

Thanks for the help.

All my drives are FAT32 already though The problem here is one of power as the HDD is not spinning when connected to the TV.

One way around this problem is to connect my laptop (much bigger HDD than my pen drive) to the TV, but at the moment I don't have a cable. As I have a few external drives I was hoping to be able to simply plug and play to save the hassle of constantly moving them (to the pen or laptop) to watch them on the TV.