Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Laptop won't read WD Passport HD

hi
has anyone any ideas, when i plug my WD passport HD into laptop, i can open folders and view pictures.
But it won't let me view movies/videos and freezes the laptop up...

have been to pc world, done all updates, installed VLC and set it as default..but no change?

the WD works on family laptops fine..

laptop is running XP and was fine till about a week ago.

grateful for any ideas..

thanks

what programme was used for vids, you may need to make sure the same programme is on your laptop, just a thought

its was media player,
but on the others it VLC...but VLC is on that one now too..

i open the WD , can see the folders , open a folder but as soon as click on a movie it freezes up...

try to uninstall it and reinstall it, other than that, ya best waiting for one of the experts on here, to come on when they get in from work, some one will solve it for you.

By WD I take it you mean Western Digital?

Have you tried it in your other pc?

sorry, yes western digital

yes its fine in all the other family laptops

needs to be formatted in either fat or fat 32 , whichever one you have now --change it to the other
if its fat32 change to fat -but it will have to be formatted clean so save the stuff on another pc before you format it .

have just tried my pen drive, that laptop is the same..
plug in usb pen drive, can open pictures and file but freezes when click on movie...

this usb drive also is working fine on all other laptops..

so i think this is a problem on this particular laptop?

Worth checking device manager: start > run > devmgmt.msc If there are any devices with a yellow exclamation mark you need to find out what the problem is. Old, corrupt or incorrectly installed drivers are the normal issue. The drives should appear under portable devices, if they don't or have yellow exclamations you need to uninstall them from within device manager: right click the correct device > uninstall. Also make sure you have the current chipset drivers installed.

If it's all USB devices, a faulty USB port on the laptop is looking more likely. But try an alternative port and see if there are any hotfixes and patches from MS.

There is also the outside chance that the laptop only has USB1.x ports which in turn are struggling to power USB2 devices (USB2 is supposed to be backwards compatible). A powered hub or PCMCIA USB host should sort the problem, but you won't know until you buy one and if it's not the case is an expense you could have done without

How much memory do you have in your laptop, and are all the drivers in for the graphics card.

If you only have a small amount of RAM then the system might not be able to cope with playing the movie with everything else it has.

Just in case it's a power issue (not enough on the USB port to spin the drive fast enough) try copying the file from the external drive to the hard drive and try playing it from there (this will also clear any WD compatibility issues)

my western digital hard drive only worked when the wd programme was installed on every device, have u got the progrmme running ok and u can view all other files, it actually blew up on me after my rabbit chewed through the power cable so i now use a external network drive and moved it out of the way of the little bugger