I bought a "Portable HDD DivX Player" on ebay for about $40.. Search ebay for "PORTABLE HDD PLAYER MP3 MP4 DV DC MULTIMEDIA DIVX USB" and you'll see what I got..

I already had a notebook hard drive, a Toshiba 80G.. When it came in, I popped in the hard drive and hooked it up to my computer.. I got the windows "ding!" as thought something had been connected.. The 'status' light on the unit went from red to green, and i felt the drive get accessed.. Right after this, I got the windows disconnected 'ding'.. So I never saw the drive available under windows at all..

I read the chenglish manual, and it says the drive needs to be formatted Fat32 (it was NTFS).. I thought that was the problem, but when I formatted it fat32 (either the whole 80G by a special utility, or by partitioning it into seperate 32G chunks) it still didn't access.. I have another 2.5" HD case I normally use with the drive, and it works fine..

Anything I'm doing wrong here? It includes a driver disc, but it's only for win98 (i'm running winxp).. The manual does say it supports large hard disks, but says "Unit made as per IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, Fujisu 2.5 inch IDE hard disk parameter, please choose recommended brands HDD." Does that mean it specifically doesn't support a Toshiba? Seems strange, IDE should be IDE... Maybe I just got a dud..

Would like to get this to work, all my DVDs are backed up to divx avi..

-Matthew

Yup, don't you just love those pigeon english Peoples ROC manuals... they take the 'engrish' language to new depths of funny...


A buddy of mine got one of these the kind that you can view video/pics/mp3 on a tv or VGA monitor and had similar problems, guess what? It was the cable, it was one of those with two male typeA usb plugs for extra power and it was'nt providing enough power and also had problems when using even a powered hub and different cables ... we ended up plugging directly to the computer and that did the trick...

BTW what "special utility" did you use to format the HD, we used the regular one thats in windows control panel-computer management-disk management to formatt the HD and it worked just fine...

Hi had a similar problem I bought something similar just got mine working my problem was my computer powersupply I had a 300 watt and had the same problem you have I could hear a ding but the drive wouldnt power up.

I bought a new power supply for my pc a 430 antec and now I got it working. (Needed a new one anyway)

befor I bought the power supply I thought maybe the problem was the fact my pc had no usb 2.0 ports so I bought a usb 2.0 pci card but that didnt work.

I am sure you need a usb 2.0 port to use the device as it says usb 2.0 on the back of the devive even though the stupid instuctions say that is supports both usb 1.1 and 2.0.

also mine has two usb plugs the same as yours that you need to use to get the extra power.

and does your external case you use that works have its own power supply.

Sorry for the delay in responses, guys..

CopRock: I have another cable that came with my Seagate 100G external drive.. It works fine for the seagate and the 2.5" drive in my maddog case, but doesn't work with the HDD Player. .

The AC power supply they sent was some plug that looked like a stove plug.. I went to WalMart and got a universal international adapter, plugged the thing in AC, but it still didn't work.. :(

gamer1978: I'm using this on a notebook computer, a Dell M90.. I don't think that's the problem, since all my other external-powered-by-USB periferals seem to work fine (including other external hard disks).. I'll try it on a motherboard-powered PC and see if that fixes it..

Although I got this off of Ebay, I found a site that sells these type items plus much more:

http://www.chinavasion.com/index.php/cName/hdd-media-player/

Since I still have this 2.5" 80G drive sitting around, I was thinking about getting the MP4 HDD Media Player on that page.. At least these guys give a warranty if it ships DOA (as my ebay item did)

-Matthew

just curious, are you using one of those usb hubs to chain several devices - maybe you need to dedicate more juice to the device? I remember reading someone having issues with a usb tuner which was resolved by plugging into a usb slot directly...

My problem was a little differant although I couldnt get it to work with my pc I did have the hard drive power up in the hdd player when connected to my TV (you dont use the the funny asian power cable with the pc only the usb cable)

If yours does not power up while connecting to you tv it may be the brand of hard drive. make sure your not using any jumpers

try installing the hard drive put it together and plug in the power adapter wall plug and see if the drive powers up you should hear it dont just rely on the stupid power light.

On the link you posted mine is one of these
Top Value HDD Media Player Enclosure $30.72

sorry I cant post link still a new member.

I also tried one of those self powered usb hubs it made no differance I borrowed my sister's didnt help with my problem

I bought an identical device from ebay, and put in a Fujitsu 2.5" 60GB FAT32 formatted HDD.

The device worked for a couple of weeks.... my laptop recognised it normally .. OTG worked too and the TV & VGA out worked as well. Spontaneously, my PC refused to recognise the device any more and OTG refused to work too, although the TV/VGA out media player functions and remote control still work fine.


This is very frustrating. The HDD works fine in another enclosure. Other HDDs refuse to work in this one. I tried it on my laptop and two different desktops, with and without the supplied power supply (had to get an adaptor for the power supply as it has a chinese plug). It seems that the USB port is dead .. I tried using a different identical USB cable too from another different-brand device, but that did not work either.

I thing that this product is one of the many cheap china electronics. I have other bad experiences with cheap china electronics.

By the way, the product specs say that the firmware is upgradable online but there is no indication from where one can download the firmware. That is the only thing I have left to try ... any ideas from where one can obtain a firmware update for this thing ???

Another question. Is it possible to hard reset the device? Perhaps powering on while pressing some combination of keys on the keypad??? Could this solve the problem ???

Anthony

could you please inform the ebay name of the seller?
So we won't but nothing to them

Moral of the story.... buy a portable media player that you can find favorable reviews on and is supported by folks in the USA. - cyclopsav.com