Which Media streamer can recognize WD My passport NTFS partitions

sood.rahul · 26 Feb 2012 at 10:23

Hello All,

I want to buy a good media streamer. I have a WD My passport 1 TB with me which I would like to connect to this media streamer so that I can stream my HD videos. Now, as you know a FAT partition cannot store more than 4 GB files, hence, I have created an NTFS partition to store those big video files.

Now, I have learnt (after some surfing on forums) that WD My passport has a firmware which doesn't allow its NTFS partition to be recognized on some LCD/LED TVs and even some media streamers & that's what happened to me. I went to a shop (hughes) and saw Sony SMP-N100 - Digital multimedia receiver & tried to connect my WD passport - the FAT partition was successfully recognized but unfortunately not the NTFS one !!!

However, when I tried to plug it to one of the Samsung LED Tvs in the shop, it got recognized...!!! Now, apart from the firmware on the disk, I feel it also depends upon the device to which I am connecting my disk.

Now, can anyone of you tell me which media streamer can recognize WD Passport NTFS partitions so that I can play my big sized movie files? Moreover, any idea if WD TV Live media streamers can recognize the WD My passport NTFS partitions. I think they should as both devices are from WD?

Thanks mates !

picnic · 26 Feb 2012 at 15:00

I use a non WD external drive formatted with NTFS on my WD Live. You'd have thought a WD streamer would be compatible with a WD drive!

sood.rahul · 26 Feb 2012 at 16:15

A non WD NTFS partition gets recognized by almost all media streamers, however, a WD NTFS partition isn't getting recognized by the Sony one that I have mentioned in my main post, hence, I just asked if it would get recognized by the WD Media Live cos they are from the same company.

picnic · 26 Feb 2012 at 19:58

I'm surprised there are multiple NTFS formats out there, but then I've never read the specs. Maybe it's a multiple partition thing that's confusing them? Also could you not simply reformat the drive in Windows if the WD NTFS format really is different?

sood.rahul · 26 Feb 2012 at 20:05

I have formatted the drive myself in windows only - I have made 4 partitions:

1) FAT - 250 GB
2) NTFS - 250 GB
3) FAT - 250 GB
4) FAT - 200 GB

I have my movies (more than 4GB) in 2nd partition & when I connected the drive to the Sony Media streamer, it couldn't recognize the 2nd partition, however, as I have mentioned in my main post, a Samsung LED TV in the shop could recognize it and I was able to play movies on that partition as well.

Strange, isn't it?

sood.rahul · 26 Feb 2012 at 20:16

And just to let you know one more thing... the Sony media streamer does recognize NTFS partitions as I have another portable hard drive which is NTFS and it did recognize that but, not the WD NTFS partition!

picnic · 27 Feb 2012 at 08:03

Does this working drive only have the one partition, or is the NTFS partition the 1st one? I'm sure that if you used Windows itself to format the WD drive it's not NTFS that's the problem. Much more likely to be the partitioning scheme.

sood.rahul · 27 Feb 2012 at 08:10

The working drive only has 1 partition. What do you mean by "Much more likely to be the partitioning scheme"? Please elaborate.

picnic · 27 Feb 2012 at 09:35

The drive that works has a single partition, the one that doesn't has more than one. Windows is not going to format a drive differently depending on its make thus I don't believe the format is significant here. The only other difference is the number of partitions. Start again with your WD drive and create a single NTFS partition and test that out. I suspect it will work as the other drive.

sood.rahul · 27 Feb 2012 at 09:57

That seems to be logical picnic ! Well, I'll try to do that & see if it works. Will need to squeeze the contents carefully as I do not want to lose my 300 GBs of data sitting in different partitions !Thanks a lot, mate !

sood.rahul · 7 Mar 2012 at 23:03

Picnic,

I haven't tried that but I'm reasonably sure that you are right. But, isn't there a way that the streamer can recognize multiple partitions. I connected my hard disk to Samsung UE46D6530 & it detected both my partitions, same happened with Panasonic GT30, but, Sony could not recognize the NTFS partition. So, it means, it is dependent on the device to which the hard disk is connected to.

Any ideas by which both the partitions can be recognized?