aTV doesn't see WD MyBook Mirror Edition (2x 1TB) over USB

Legacy 1st gen Apple TV
1

i just got a new apple tv, boosted it with aTV flash today, mainly, so i could use the 2tb external drive i just got as well via usb.

this is the drive: Link Not Found - a Western Digital 2TB MyBook Mirror Edition
i format it with a snow leopard macbook using disk utility (no RAID setup being used). for test purposes i wanted to see if the connection between the drive and appletv works fine via usb, without having any files on it yet.

all of my macs (macbook prev gen (snow leo), current macbook (leo), macbook pro (leo), akoya hackbook (leo/kalyway)) can see the drive when hooked up via usb without problems (just the hackbook has issues seeing it in HFS+ sometimes).
now, when i have the drive formatted in HFS+, appletv will boot up without problems, but the drive doesn’t show up anywhere (i usually check in files > places). if i format it fat32, appletv doesn’t seem to boot up. after a few minutes i cancelled the process anyways by either rebooting or unplugging the usb cable, which both leads to a reboot. if i boot up and plug the drive in afterwards, apple tv gets really slow to respond for a couple of minutes and i can see the drive obviously showing activity, but without any result – no drive seems to be mounted.

any ideas what could be the problem here – and more importantly, the fix? i would prefer HFS+ to FAT, but if FAT’s the only way to go, so be it.
thanks much in advance,
mario

update 1:
i DID test the whole setup with a 2 gb flash drive, and aTV does see that and plays media from it
after so many minutes, the drive in FAT32, plugged in after booting, suddenly DID show up. still, something seems off.

update 2:
after a few minutes, atv will also power up now with the FAT32 drive plugged in. however, it takes about 4 minutes each reboot.
visibility:

  • the files are visible in “files > places” now
  • i cannot see the files in “nitoTV > files” (“Empty Folder!” message occurs)
  • in media, sapphire sees all the files
2

If your WD drive has the ‘Virtual CD’ software it should be removed by following the guide here:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdsmartwareutilities

3

thanks. i initially had repartitioned the whole thing, so i suppose the extra partition was removed then.

so far i still only have it working on fat, not hfs. yesterday i ran into another problem: after a few weeks of it working alright, yesterday the whole setup started to get really, really slow. when the disk is disconnected, everything seems back to normal, but when i plug it in, i am having issues. especially when scrolling through the movie list in xbmc (theres about 750 movies in the library), after a few clicks down the whole system freezes and i need to unplug atv, unhook the usb, boot up atv, replug in the usb and with a little luck the drive mounts after a few minutes.
this only happens when the usb drive is hooked up.
i already have run verify and repair disk in the osx disk utility, no problems were reported on the usb drive.

i use xbmc since a couple of weeks ago any movie viles (mostly avi/divx/xvid) stopped working within sapphire/nitotv. that is, they do work, but after a few seconds of playing, the picture starts to pixel out and freeze. this gets fixed by hitting pause and play again, but all in all that’s hardly a satisfying way to use this toy. xbmc has been working well for me, up until now, when this problem of the freezing atv started. it pretty much happened right after i had finally finished getting my entire media lib onto the drive. it holds about 1.6 tb in audio, video and photos now.
another symptom i have noticed today is, that the hostname gets hardly recognized over ssh anymore, instead i need to get in by using the ip address. i can ping the hostname, but not ssh to it.

r8r:~ r8r$ ssh frontrow@appletv.local
ssh: Could not resolve hostname appletv.local: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
r8r:~ r8r$ ssh frontrow@192.168.xxx.xxx

Welcome to the world of Apple TV with aTV Flash
--For support please visit aTVFlash.com--

frontrow@192.168.xxx.xxx's password: 
-bash-2.05b$ exit
logout
Connection to 192.168.xxx.xxx closed.
r8r:~ r8r$ ping appletv.local
PING appletv.local (192.168.xxx.xxx): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.634 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.227 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.165 ms
^C
--- appletv.local ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.165/1.342/1.634/0.208 ms

any idea what could be the reason for any of these issues?

4

First, remove the virtual cd software via the link above. it’s a hardware flash, something that can only be done with WD’s patch.
Second, go into disk utility and create a partition using the entire 2TB. THEN you will be able to format it to HFS. Without the partition, it won’t work. Trust me, I went through this back and forth. This is the solution.