[Kurt Sloane]

hello. Uber new to kodi, so bare with me if this seems trivial.

So i have a external hard drive with a couple movies on it i wish to play. Im running an Android Q7 TV box through my TV (so not hooked up to my computer at all) Now, ive done what you are supposed to do which is

go into kodi > videos > files > add videos > click "browse"

the problem I have from here is it doesnt show my external hard drive anywhere. Ive gone through all the sub folders, but i cant find it anywhere.

whenever i plug the hard drive into the box, in the bottom right hand corner, it immediately tells me that my hard drive is safe to remove.

Is the box not reading the external hard drive? Cause ive tried it with 2 different memory sticks also. could this be why its not turning up in kodi?

its a "newbie" problem. Id appreciate the help if i can get some.

[oldtvwatcher]

My guess (and this is just a guess) would be that the drive is formatted in a format that the Android box doesn't recognize. Do you know the format of the drive? If it is, for example, NTFS (Windows) you may be able to go into the app store and search for NTFS and find an app that contains the drivers necessary to let you read NTFS drives. I am just using that as an example; for all I know an Android box might be able to read NTFS drives without any help, but your drive may be in some other format that it doesn't recognize. What kind of computer was used to format the drive?

If you bought the external drive and never formatted it, then it probably came formatted as either FAT32 or NTFS. But if neither of those then who knows what it's actually formatted as.

This is just a shot in the dark since I'm not at all familiar with your box. Anyway, this sounds like it may not be a Kodi problem; if your TV box has a user forum you might want to ask there. Kodi can't read a drive that isn't currently mounted, and when you get the "safe to remove" message that means it's definitely not mounted.

[learningit]

To add to the above:
1) Try seeing if you can view the drive from the Kodi File Manager. You may find it listed there under something like "external drive".
2) It sounds like this is a USB drive. You may be able to attach the drive directly to your router and enable it as a "NAS" or "SMB" which will allow Kodi to see it as a networked drive. See if there is a USB port on your router and if so, check if you can mount the drive on it - you may need to enable in the router config.
3) If you have a Windows machine, you could attach the drive to it enable it as "shared" or an SMB, which would give Kodi access to the drive.

[Kurt Sloane]

thanks xbmclinuxuser, i figured it was cause the drive wasnt mounting in the box. ill explore the android forums.

[Stazzyboo]

Maybe it's too late to reply but maybe it will help someone else searching for an answer. I don't have your box but I do have an Android Kdlinks media player for my TV and had ran into the same problem as you and have a solution!

After you go to ADD VIDEOS-->go to BROWSE, go to ROOT FILESYSTEM folder then go to MNT. That is where you will find your external hard drive, the hard drive folders are always named differently especially if you have several hard drives/USB and multiple USB ports. Mine are named [sdb, sdc, sdd] but they may be completely different names for you (the ones NOT to check is: ASEC, FLASH, MEDIA_RW, SDCARD, SECURE, SHELL,TMP).

If you plug in your hard drives in into different ports next time you won't be able to use the same folder name you saved and you will have to browse for your hard drive again but this time it will rename itself by inserting a 1 after the hard drive ports codes (sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 and later in sdb2, sdc2, sdd2, etc)<---so keep that in mind next time you plug in a new USB or into a different port, the folders you save directing to your hard drive won't work so you will have to re-browse.

Hope this helps someone!

[JJabroad]

I am using an Android Xidoo TV Box (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015SN...UTF8&psc=1) with Kodi installed on it. I have a 4TB External 3.0 USB Drive and had to create NTFS partitions at 1TB for the box to be able to find the media. The above advise was spot on and much appreciated. I used Paragon NTFS for Mac 14 to create the partitions with my Mac (using OS X El Capitan).

[Markdonnell1975]

Maybe it's too late to reply but maybe it will help someone else searching for an answer. I don't have your box but I do have an Android Kdlinks media player for my TV and had ran into the same problem as you and have a solution!

After you go to ADD VIDEOS-->go to BROWSE, go to ROOT FILESYSTEM folder then go to MNT. That is where you will find your external hard drive, the hard drive folders are always named differently especially if you have several hard drives/USB and multiple USB ports. Mine are named [sdb, sdc, sdd] but they may be completely different names for you (the ones NOT to check is: ASEC, FLASH, MEDIA_RW, SDCARD, SECURE, SHELL,TMP).

If you plug in your hard drives in into different ports next time you won't be able to use the same folder name you saved and you will have to browse for your hard drive again but this time it will rename itself by inserting a 1 after the hard drive ports codes (sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 and later in sdb2, sdc2, sdd2, etc)<---so keep that in mind next time you plug in a new USB or into a different port, the folders you save directing to your hard drive won't work so you will have to re-browse.

Hope this helps someone!

I registered just to tell you thank you for this. I have been racking my brain trying to figure this out. Thank you!

[JohnL4]

On my MX III Android TV I found the missing USB disk under /root/storage rather than /root/mnt

[go45cvi]

On my MX III Android TV I found the missing USB disk under /root/storage rather than /root/mnt

 On my Shield the external NTFS drive was showing up in the sources but I could not set it as a source for movies in the usual way.  I had to long press on the folder and set its source.  HTH.

[DarrenHill]

Thread moved to Android, although some note on the dates of the less recent posts maybe in order.