Iomega hard drive problem please help!

stedabee

Hi i recently got my Iomega to work with my macbook, in doing so i had to totally wipe anything on the hard drive in order to transfer stuff from macbook to it.

So i ended up backing up my macbook and put a few videos and other stuff on it but now when i connect to the tv Iomega comes up on the screen and nothing else happens. The front light keeps blinking as if its going through everything and its telling me to wait, i waited for like 5 mins and still no luck.
Surely having 100gb on a 1.5tb hard drive doesn't expect you to wait that long???

Who ever could help would make me so happy as I've deleted so much stuff from my macbook after transferring to hard drive.

Many Thanks

Torqay

stedabee wrote: »

when i connect to the tv Iomega comes up on the screen and nothing else happens.

It doesn't work with the TV, but it still works on the Mac? The drive is probably formatted with an incompatible file system (HFS+?).

stedabee wrote: »

So i ended up backing up my macbook and ... deleted so much stuff from my macbook

This is not exactly a "backup", one copy of a file is not good enough.

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

It doesn't work with the TV, but it still works on the Mac? The drive is probably formatted with an incompatible file system (HFS+?).

Well when i originally connected to macbook it didnt allow me to drag files and then one day i connected it again and it allowed me for some strange reason.
So since wiping and putting stuff on it anytime i try connect to tv im just stuck with the the iomega screen shot and a blinking light????

it always worked perfectly before connecting to macbook! Its really bugging me.


This is not exactly a "backup", one copy of a file is not good enough.

True but see i only have a 250gb on the macbook so need to free up space quickly.

yoyo

Your drive needs to be FAT32 formatted to work on the TV. Formatting will require you to wipe it so perhaps buy another hd for additional Mac storage/buy a hard disk upgrade and keep the one for TV content is the best bet

Nick

stedabee

yoyo wrote: »

Your drive needs to be FAT32 formatted to work on the TV. Formatting will require you to wipe it so perhaps buy another hd for additional Mac storage/buy a hard disk upgrade and keep the one for TV content is the best bet

Nick

So i right in saying if the hard drive is working with the macbook its basically formatted for the mac and with that wont work with tv unless FAT32?

If so how do i transfer movies to hard drive from macbook so that it will work on tv?? surely theres a way?

Torqay

The Mac should support FAT32.

Follow these steps to format your drive:

On your Mac, connect and power the drive
Open Mac HD on your desktop
Open Applications
Open Utilities
Open Disk Utility
On the left you should see the hard drive listed. It should show the drive size with a second indented line beneath it that shows the volume of the drive.
Click "Erase" at the top of the screen.
Select MS DOS(FAT) File System for the volume format option.
Change the name of the drive if desired.
Click "Erase" at the bottom of the screen. You will get a warning and will need to click "Erase" again.

The drive will be formatted as FAT32 when completed.

Save important files back onto your Mac before you do this as everything on the drive will be deleted.

The limitation of FAT32, it does not allow files > 4GB, so DVD/Bluray images are out of the question.

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

The Mac should support FAT32.

K so torqay could you tell me how to format? is this a simple enough process?

Torqay

Edited my previous post accordingly

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

Edited my previous post accordingly

Thanks a mill. gonna do this now!

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

The Mac should support FAT32.



Save important files back onto your Mac before you do this as everything on the drive will be deleted.

The limitation of FAT32, it does not allow files > 4GB, so DVD/Bluray images are out of the question.

Well done everything and still no luck, same problem! sooooo annoying.

stedabee

Anyone have any more ideas??

Torqay

OK, the drive is now FAT32 formatted and works fine on your Mac? Can you try it on some Windows machine? The problem is only with the TV? The drive has been working with the TV before?

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

OK, the drive is now FAT32 formatted and works fine on your Mac? Can you try it on some Windows machine? The problem is only with the TV? The drive has been working with the TV before?

Ye formatted to FAT32 following all the instructions and everything went 100%.
Then put two movies on and tried with the tv and the same thing happened again, tv screen says Iomega screen play and stays like that. Works perfecting on mac......i even enabled file sharing incase that was a reason for not working.

Yes before putting movies on using the mac it worked perfectly. Its deffo not the tv as it doesn't work on my friends either.

i found this on the net and someone else has the same problem but no solution

http://www.fixya.com/support/t13106355-when_connected_tv_iomega_logo_stays_tv

yoyo

I wonder did the Mac screw up a vital Iomega system partition? I would try formatting the drive to FAT32 on a windows machine if feasible, it does sound like an issue with the formatting. Mac's also add many hidden folders which may be confusing the hard drive (The .MAC_OS_X finder ones)

Nick

stedabee

yoyo wrote: »

I would try formatting the drive to FAT32 on a windows machine if feasible, it does sound like an issue with the formatting. Mac's also add many hidden folders which may be confusing the hard drive (The .MAC_OS_X finder ones)

Nick

I have Parallels on the mac so would it be ok to do it through that ye? shouldn't make a difference i guess?

Now when you say the mac might of added a folder im wondering could this of happen when i backed up the macbook to the hardrive, when i connect to mac and open i have my backup folder and only one other which holds my videos and movies in!

mathepac

Some TVs (depending on their firmware) can only access relatively small partitions, so I'd guess "... a 1.5tb hard drive ..." may be your problem.

Torqay

yoyo wrote: »

I would try formatting the drive to FAT32 on a windows machine if feasible

Windows won't allow you to to format drives of this size with FAT32, you'll have to do this from a command prompt, using the following command:

format /FS:FAT32 X:

Where X: is the drive letter, you might also add the switch /q for quick format.

If you get this error message: “The volume is too big for FAT32”, you'll need some USB formatting utility such as Rufus.

stedabee

mathepac wrote: »

Some TVs (depending on their firmware) can only access relatively small partitions, so I'd guess "... a 1.5tb hard drive ..." may be your problem.

No see it worked perfectly before i connected to mac. Basically in oder for me to put new stuff on it i have to erase everything. See my friend originally put stuff on for me and in order for me to put new videos on with my mac i had to erase all the old data and on with the new....ever since that it just doesn't work???

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

Windows won't allow you to to format drives of this size with FAT32, you'll have to do this from a command prompt, using the following command:

format /FS:FAT32 X:

Where X: is the drive letter, you might also add the switch /q for quick format.

If you get this error message: “The volume is too big for FAT32”, you'll need some USB formatting utility such as Rufus.

i Appreciate ur time to tell me this but honestly i dont know where to start to even get to that point, Not that good with stuff like that!

Torqay

can you post the model of the drive?

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

can you post the model of the drive?

Ye sure its
P/n 3184600
Model:spplhd
S/N 0gak4651m6

Screenplay Plus HD

Torqay

OK, it's a media player with hard drive. When you deleted "files", you have also deleted the "user interface needed for operating the drive on a TV".

You'll need a Windows computer to reinstall the firmware.

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

OK, it's a media player with hard drive. When you deleted "files", you have also deleted the "user interface needed for operating the drive on a TV".

You'll need a Windows computer to reinstall the firmware.

Brilliant thanks a mill for all your help. gonna try this now.....wish me luck!

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

OK, it's a media player with hard drive. When you deleted "files", you have also deleted the "user interface needed for operating the drive on a TV".

You'll need a Windows computer to reinstall the firmware.

K so the good news is it working and now connects to the tv perfectly and the bad news is that now I can't drag any files from my mac onto the hard drive, this happened before until it asked me to erase everything and then I could! In doing that I obviously deleted that important file that was needed in order to make it work with the tv!

So now my question is it compatible with mac? I have enabled file sharing and all I get is a no enter sign as I hold over the hard drive about to drop??

After all that work I was so happy when it worked with tv and then I go to put files on and the high went to a low once again! I officially hate Iomega !

yoyo

I would assume the Mac can write FAT32, although I am not sure about Macs tbh this is a fairly "standard" feature. Make sure you write to the FAT32 partition on the Mac, and not the one containing the video codecs/drives firmware info. Your Mac should not ask you to format the drive, if it does you will be back to square one. This is not an Iomega fault btw, why devices only support the archaic FAT32 format is where the issue lies.

Nick

Torqay

Drive format NTFS now?

Do it again, but make sure the drive is formatted with FAT32. Or find some utility that will allow your Mac dealing with NTFS drives.

stedabee wrote: »

I officially hate Iomega !

Don't blame Iomega for the shortcomings of your Mac.

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

Drive format NTFS now?

Do it again, but make sure the drive is formatted with FAT32. Or find some utility that will allow your Mac dealing with NTFS drives.



Don't blame Iomega for the shortcomings of your Mac.

I checked and the hard drive is formatted to FAT32, what do I do to see if my mac will allow NTFS.

Ye I suppose it is the mac and not Iomega!
STUPID MAC!!!

By the way thanks a mill for all the input guys, wouldn't know where I'd be without it......I know either the hard drive or mac would be out the window anyway!

yoyo

It looks like you may need to "repair permissions" on the drive, not saying this will help, but have a read here someone having similar issues

Nick

Torqay

If I were you, I'd sell the Iomega drive, grab a WD TV Live box instead and be done with it..

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

If I were you, I'd sell the Iomega drive, grab a WD TV Live box instead and be done with it..

Are these things good? Is it a hard drive too or just a streaming device?

stedabee

yoyo wrote: »

It looks like you may need to "repair permissions" on the drive, not saying this will help, but have a read here someone having similar issues

Nick

Cheers man, just downloading the WD software now and ill let you know how i get on.

stedabee

yoyo wrote: »

It looks like you may need to "repair permissions" on the drive, not saying this will help, but have a read here someone having similar issues

Nick

No luck software keeps stalling. Being doing alot of reading all i can find is people saying you have to format to FAT32 to make it read and write but in order to do that you have to erase which in turn will bring me back to not working with the tv.....its just a big circle.

yoyo

stedabee wrote: »

No luck software keeps stalling. Being doing alot of reading all i can find is people saying you have to format to FAT32 to make it read and write but in order to do that you have to erase which in turn will bring me back to not working with the tv.....its just a big circle.

The main issue is the drive must be formatted in Windows as FAT32 as if you attempt to format it to FAT32 in Mac this will also erase the hard drives codecs and player tools. I don't see why a Mac wouldn't write to a FAT32 drive regardless.
I'll move this over to the Mac forum for you, where you will hopefully get a better response. There are also drivers you can buy for OSX which will write data to NTFS partitions, which may possibly be a workaround.

Nick

Torqay

stedabee wrote: »

Are these things good? Is it a hard drive too or just a streaming device?

WD TV Live just "the box", no hard drive. You can connect any HDD or USB stick. You can stream over a network. And yes, they are good.

Torqay

yoyo wrote: »

I'll move this over to the Mac forum for you, where you will hopefully get a better response.

The restoration of the Firmware after deletion or formatting has to be done in Windows, Iomega does not offer a Mac utility for that.

stedabee

yoyo wrote: »

The main issue is the drive must be formatted in Windows as FAT32 as if you attempt to format it to FAT32 in Mac this will also erase the hard drives codecs and player tools. I don't see why a Mac wouldn't write to a FAT32 drive regardless.
I'll move this over to the Mac forum for you, where you will hopefully get a better response. There are also drivers you can buy for OSX which will write data to NTFS partitions, which may possibly be a workaround.

Nick

k finally i got it to work, so what i did was when i went to disk utilities and selected the hard drive there were four drop downs disk1s1-disk1s2-linux swap and untitled. All of them except untitled were FAT32 so i changed the last one hoping it wouldn't erase the update and thankfully it didnt, so its read and write now. So i checked with the tv and that works perfectly too.......good news AY!! So then i put one movie on and go to play and it wont, it says file not recognized which was a mp4, so i put a avi and mkv and it will only play a avi.

Well at least i got it now read and write but now i have to find a way to make it recognize all media files???? Problems never seem to end ??

stedabee

Torqay wrote: »

The restoration of the Firmware after deletion or formatting has to be done in Windows, Iomega does not offer a Mac utility for that.

So do you think i should do this even though i have it working now from the mac ? only problem is its only reading avi files? If i format with windows should i be then able to transfer files from mac to hard drive?

muggyog

Just an observation. This media player is Windows centric and the firmware ( Linux based?) and formatting is designed that way. The issue with Mac is that natively it will read/write to Fat32 but not NTFS. The default format on the media player is NTFS and the firmware is on a second partition. The second partition is indicated by the

When prompted, choose Keep Multimedia Data OR Remove All Data and click Next. The installer will take approximately 1-2 minutes to copy the firmware update files to the ScreenPlay Plus.

in the firmware install instructions and your comments regarding the 'four dropdowns'. You have got round the Windows procedure for formatting by formating the data partition (untitled) to Fat32 on the Mac. Iomega recommend this method to format to Fat32. If you think you need to reformat through Windows use this method.

Regarding your issue with the playing of filetypes, .MKV has a red X here.

stedabee

muggyog wrote: »

Just an observation. This media player is Windows centric and the firmware ( Linux based?) and formatting is designed that way. The issue with Mac is that natively it will read/write to Fat32 but not NTFS. The default format on the media player is NTFS and the firmware is on a second partition. The second partition is indicated by the
in the firmware install instructions and your comments regarding the 'four dropdowns'. You have got round the Windows procedure for formatting by formating the data partition (untitled) to Fat32 on the Mac. Iomega recommend this method to format to Fat32. If you think you need to reformat through Windows use this method.

Regarding your issue with the playing of filetypes, .MKV has a red X here.

Ye was great to finally solve it but then annoying that I can't play mp4! Just noticed myself that it won't play mkv anyway, would love to know why it won't play mp4???

muggyog

I believe that would be a codec matter!

from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Codecs-frequently-asked-questions

Are codecs and file formats the same?
No, although it can be confusing because they sometimes have the same name. You can think of a file format as a type of container. Inside the container is data that has been compressed by using a particular codec. For example, a file format such as Windows Media Audio contains data that is compressed by using the Windows Media Audio codec. However, a file format such as Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) can contain data that is compressed by any of a number of different codecs, including the MPEG-2, DivX, or XviD codecs. AVI files can also contain data that is not compressed by any codec. Consequently, you might be able to play some AVI files and not others, depending on which codecs were used to compress the file and which codecs you have installed on your computer. For the same reason, you also might be able to play the audio portion of an AVI file, but not the video portion.

Could be the media player OR the TV has the problem.

Another note is that because the Iomega firmware ( operating system in effect ) is Linux as confirmed by downloading the open source version, if you feel brave/confident/insane, you can run alternative firmware.. Be aware that this project seems to have stopped in 2009 since this is the last entry in superbernys ( programmer ) wiki page.

DubDJ

Unfortunately most media boxes are limited by what file types they'll play. Same problem with a lot of modern TV's with USB ports on the back. Handy to have them but they'll only play certain file types, usually AVI or MP4.

What I done recently for an older TV is pick up a Cyclone Micro 3 box. They're available from Amazon for around €45 delivered. (Cheapest I found it). It works for every movie file i've tried. Comes with a built in 8GB of storage. Supports ExFat format so you can add files over 4GB on an external drive.

But it also has a USB and SD card slot. I picked up this decent 500GB Hard Drive from Amazon for €50. Haven't received it yet but it has good reviews.

They also have cheap Amazon Basic HDMI cables for £3.49 as an Add on item so you'd have to spend over £20 to get it.

So for around €100 for the lot you can add any single file type you want to the 500GB hard drive. Just connect it up to the cyclone box and watch full 1080p HD films through your TV.

If you are thinking of going for a different box instead of the Iomega i'd recommend the above. Great little media boxes. Comes with a remote and also has support for subtitles so you can toggle them on and off.

Made life a lot easier for me. Before this I was burning DVD's which was a time consuming pain!

stedabee

DubDJ wrote: »

Unfortunately most media boxes are limited by what file types they'll play. Same problem with a lot of modern TV's with USB ports on the back. Handy to have them but they'll only play certain file types, usually AVI or MP4.

What I done recently for an older TV is pick up a Cyclone Micro 3 box. They're available from Amazon for around €45 delivered. (Cheapest I found it). It works for every movie file i've tried. Comes with a built in 8GB of storage. Supports ExFat format so you can add files over 4GB on an external drive.

But it also has a USB and SD card slot. I picked up this decent 500GB Hard Drive from Amazon for €50. Haven't received it yet but it has good reviews.

They also have cheap Amazon Basic HDMI cables for £3.49 as an Add on item so you'd have to spend over £20 to get it.

So for around €100 for the lot you can add any single file type you want to the 500GB hard drive. Just connect it up to the cyclone box and watch full 1080p HD films through your TV.

If you are thinking of going for a different box instead of the Iomega i'd recommend the above. Great little media boxes. Comes with a remote and also has support for subtitles so you can toggle them on and off.

Made life a lot easier for me. Before this I was burning DVD's which was a time consuming pain!

Cheers man gonna have a look at these and maybe order one!

DubDJ

stedabee wrote: »

Cheers man gonna have a look at these and maybe order one!

Bit of an option replacing the whole thing but it's probably easier. Plus if the Hard Drive ever fills up you can just upgrade. More cost effective than buying a brand new media box.

stedabee

DubDJ wrote: »

Bit of an option replacing the whole thing but it's probably easier. Plus if the Hard Drive ever fills up you can just upgrade. More cost effective than buying a brand new media box.

Ye very true, this thing is driving me mad and would do anything to sort it so ill probably keep it as a back up hd and buy the one you listed for everything else.