[Natty]

Yo guys,

Long time user and lurker, but I've hit a road bump that I can't solve, or find an answer to.

I'm using an android box and for ages its been working fine, no problems at all. However today I come home and try to transfer a movie to the hard drive, all goes well, but when I plug it back into the android box, it looks like there's nothing on the drive. I've noticed it used to come up as sda2, and now its sda1, but still, shouldn't it show some media or at least the folders?

Interestingly, if I plug in a usb thumb drive with a tv show on, I can see it, and it plays fine, but not so lucky with the hard drive.

What's more bizarre is, I've plugged the hard drive into my laptop and its working without a problem, and if I run kodi on the laptop, and set up UPNP on the android box, all the media is there and I can watch it all.

That rules out my two first thoughts.
1. Hard drive is broken (but clearly not if it works on laptop)
2. USB on android box is broken (clearly not if thumbdrive works)

I've tried resetting the box to factory settings and reinstalling all necessary updates, reinstalling kodi etc. but not having any luck. It's really annoying!

Does anyone have any good advice for the next steps to try? If you need any extra info about my setup, just let me know, I'll be watching as I'm eager to get this working again and back to its full glory

[cd2022]

If you had 2 USB ports then plug something else in first to let the box assign sda1 to it and your hd can be sda2 again. Are you using stickmount?

[Natty]

thanks for the suggestion! I've tried this and the hard drive is then assigned sdb1 and still appears as empty (no folders or anything) - arrrgh!

[wyild1]

Whats the format of the drive? Maybe its something the Android box cant read?

[cd2022]

thanks for the suggestion! I've tried this and the hard drive is then assigned sdb1 and still appears as empty (no folders or anything) - arrrgh!

Did you connect it directly or via a router USB port? Is it plug n play or you'd need a mounting app ie stickmount. Try stickmount if possible.

[Natty]

Hey guys,
The drive is ExFat, and was read by the box yesterday, but then suddenly stopped, so the format isn't the issue.

I've tried it through a USB hub and directly into the box. There's only one port, so had to use the hub for the suggestion above. I've been using the hub for months though and its never caused any issues.

I've still got the warrenty, and the store is only down the road so I think I'll try and swap it for another unit and go from there.

Thinking about things, I did do a disk repair on the drive in Mac Disk Utility, maybe this changed the partition map? But even so, the android box should see something on the drive right? I mean, it knows it's connected!

EDIT (THIS IS RIDICULOUS!)
Do I've got a little box for my phone that acts as both a spare battery kind of thing, and a media server. I can plug a USB drive into it and watch movies on my phone as it sends out a wifi network... I decided to try an experiment and plugged the missing drive into this box, connected it up to the android system through and now I can basically stream the movies through that.

This is completely ridiculous work around, but at least it means I can watch my stuff again haha!

EDIT AGAIN:
I've installed ES File Explorer and it shows me that sda1 is only 196mb - this is a 3tb drive! - So things are starting to look like my disk has a small partition added onto it, and this android box is only seeing that... What can I do besides formatting the whole thing, losing all my media and starting again? that doesn't sound like much fun.....