Question TV player keeps forgetting my external HDD and it thinks it's a phone ?

[evermorex76]

I forgot to mention: I believe the previous owner used Mac. Just not sure how much he knows about partitions and stuff.

Every OS that boots with UEFI (therefore on a GPT-partitioned drive) creates an EFI partition during install. I just defaulted to referring to Windows. Maybe they cloned their Mac at some point and then deleted the OS/data partition.

Perhaps, the problem could be the size on the drive? You said the TV shouldn't make a difference between HDD und USB Flash. But perhaps the newest firmware has issues with external devices that carry hundreds of GB, if not TB

A 5TB drive isn't considered particularly large anymore, hasn't been for a long time. Once we got past the 2TB limit, issues with large sizes basically went away. Even if the Android TV firmware were still stuck on the first release from 2014 and was just being maintained without the major version changing, it should have no problems with a large drive (and your A80 TV is much newer than that, maybe having originally had ADT 12 or even ADT 13), and you weren't having any problems before. It seems clear at this point that Sony just royally f'ed up this firmware version, and they'd have to have really done something dumb to make it have problems with large drives in particular.

The only possible thing left that might make a difference and maybe somewhat vindicate Sony would be using a different 4TB+ drive like one from WD, or even just a different Seagate. I still don't think that would totally or even mostly take away responsibility from Sony, since the Seagate worked before, but perhaps you could maybe say the Seagate drive has some obscure way of functioning that just happens to be a problem with another obscure thing in the new Sony firmware but was not a problem before or with any other device. That would be an extremely long reach for an explanation, though.

Maybe a 4TB USB SSD could work better since it would be much faster response, but that's pretty expensive to get based on hope, and I don't have high confidence in it making a difference. (Although a different TV equivalent to yours wouldn't be cheap, either.) I don't know what model of Seagate drive you have now, either, but maybe just a better/faster model would help. There just isn't really any reason for the OS to be choking while trying to read the drive, even if it's a slow 5400RPM model, so better performance SHOULDN'T help, other than Sony having really messed up the firmware like making it not like if the drive doesn't respond quickly enough.

 

[Pandaman11]

It seems clear at this point that Sony just royally f'ed up this firmware version, and they'd have to have really done something dumb to make it have problems with large drives in particular.

Yeah I guess. I just hope they'll be useful with all the information I sent them. They said that they forwarded it to higher ranked people.

That would be an extremely long reach for an explanation, though.

Yes I know. But I want to try absolutely everything possible, however I can't get my hands on a WD or so right now.

There just isn't really any reason for the OS to be choking while trying to read the drive, even if it's a slow 5400RPM model, so better performance SHOULDN'T help, other than Sony having really messed up the firmware like making it not like if the drive doesn't respond quickly enough.

Yeah, and I've had the same model for years, never a problem in the past

 

[Pandaman11]

I would definitely try removing the MSR partition. I'm almost certain that's the cause of the drive being listed twice on the TV, and if the firmware update can cause that kind of problem with a standard formatting of a drive, then it wouldn't be surprising if that formatting caused the other problems too, just because of poor coding in the new firmware.

How do I do that?

Under diskmgmt.msc, this partition is not shown.

And with Aomei, I chose Delete Partition, but nothing happened, it's still there.

 

[evermorex76]

Diskpart on the command line should be able to do it, or you may potentially have to use the "clean" command in diskpart which would completely wipe the drive. Although at this point it's seeming like nothing you do is going to make any difference to the main problem of not reading the files and folders properly, and being forgotten every time you unplug it (or even while it's plugged in).

 

[Pandaman11]

What's also weird: sometimes Media Player remembers "too much". For example, it shows me files that I already deleted days ago. Of course I can't play them, but they still appear in the menu.

So yes, I guess I just have to wait and hope for Sony.