External Media Drive Question

ChiefBarrett1975 · Mar 27, 2020

Greetings Fellow Xbox One Peeps!

I have five different Xbox Ones, ranging from the old original Xbone to the Xbox One S. I have yet to buy the "X", as I just use them mostly for streaming movies and stuff.

I have several external drives that I use for TV shows and movies. The smallest is a Toshiba 1TB, with the largest being a 5TB Seagate. There are 6 drives total (I have them separated into different genres and made for certain people in the family). I had
never had any issues with any of my consoles reading the drives properly for the last three to four years; and then, all of a sudden, in the last few months, none of my consoles is reading any of my drives properly! I have reformatted the drives, updated the
consoles, reset the consoles using the hard reset method, everything that everyone has mentioned in the past forums. I have not seen anyone recently post anything about having the same problem I am. I was hoping it wasn't isolated to me. Anyone else having
these issues?

I had some success when I formatted one the drives to exFAT instead of NTFS, but then the Xbox would only read some of the movies and shows (many of them were on the drive but the Xbox refused to acknowledge them!). Also, of note, when I check the drives
in the settings menu, the name of the drives is sometimes written in Japanese characters mixed with alpha-numerics. Weird...

Thoughts?

Thanks for any assist!

:)

Quartermaine75

Thanks Metal,

The last drive I bought was for that very reason. It still had the same issue.

I was thinking about it last night though, after I posted this thread. I had an older Android phone a while back that would only allow me to play music that I had bought through Amazon. I could transfer music from iTunes and my personal library that I had
burned from CDs, but it would only allow me to play back the stuff from Amazon. So, I am wondering if there was an update I wasn't privy to for Xbox that may have added a similar type of copy protection?

I did a scan on my master drive (10TB WD easystore) last night as well, just in case all of this could be caused by something malicious. The scan came back clean.

For sure, this is a very baffling issue. Not to mention highly irritating!

Cheers!

M3tal Daz3

Seems like there is some corrupt data on those drives. Try to use a new drive with your console.

USA1fan

The real question is, can you store your games on the external hard drive, once it's enabled? I believe you can store media on the external with a 360, but if you 'install' a game, it has to be to the internal drive.

GroundOregano94

That hard drive must be designated as a media drive. Not formatted as Xbox drive. Because Xbox recognizes SSD it immediately recognizes it as a media drive. Here is troubleshot for external
hard drives. Have you tried to start movies from USB drive? Remember, in settings on your Xbox that drive must be designated as a media drive. You can try reformated it again on your PC and then plug it in again on Xbox. One other thing. If your HDD is
recognised as media drive on your Xbox, you can format again on your Xbox and set it as media drive again. System/storage - select your media drive and pres a. Then formate it as media drive again. And finally, the question that supposed to be first. Is your
HDD recognized as a media drive? Is it recognized at all?

Have you tried to change USB ports to plug it in? And last, try a power cycle console described here on the bottom of the page and try plug
back in your HDD.

Hordie

Open the media player app. When you run the Media Player app, select your external USB drive, and then select the media that you want to play.

External Media Drive Question