Help USB and Universal Serial Bus devices

[spikedelta]

I am new to android and was swayed to the Thrive because of the full USB capability over ANY other tablet. Having said that, the only thing that I have that actually works with the USB on the thrive is my thumb drive. Neither my external portable hard drive which houses my 400GB music and video collection nor my portable DVD player work through when plugged in to the USB port. I get an error message that says there is no USB device connected.
My question is simply is there a way to get the tablet to recognize either device or am I limited to the 64GB of combined SD and internal memory plus my thumb drive?

 

[Zenstrive]

what format is filesystem on your hard drive?
can it be used with external power supply?

 

[rushmore]

Hard drive needs to be in FAT32, since Android does not have the needed drivers to support NTFS.

 

[Geekslayer]

Rushmore is correct. You can wait until they come out with NTFS support for Android, Or copy the files to your computer, then format your USB drive to exFAT (removes the limitations of fat32). Windows 7 supports this out of the box, but If you're using XP, you can download the drivers from Microsoft (Must have SP2 installed)

Download Details - Microsoft Download Center - Update for Windows XP (KB955704)

 

[spikedelta]

You all ROCK! Thanks for the info. The Ext hard drive does not have the option of an external power source. The DVD player does, but it is still not recognized. As far as the formatting option, I am trying to figure out how to copy all the info to another media location so that I can effectively reformat. I don't currently have a hard drive big enough to copy it on to!
Any advice for the USB DVD drive...I know that they are probably going by the way of the dinosaur...Unfortunately, my work still uses it as a distribution mechanism.

 

[bsweetness]

You all ROCK! Thanks for the info. The Ext hard drive does not have the option of an external power source. The DVD player does, but it is still not recognized. As far as the formatting option, I am trying to figure out how to copy all the info to another media location so that I can effectively reformat. I don't currently have a hard drive big enough to copy it on to!
Any advice for the USB DVD drive...I know that they are probably going by the way of the dinosaur...Unfortunately, my work still uses it as a distribution mechanism.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I have yet to see anyone who has gotten a USB DVD drive to work. I don't think the driver support is there. I've seen a lot of talk about trying to get it to work, but I haven't seen any successful reports.

 

[Darkseas]

I have yet to see anyone who has gotten a USB DVD drive to work. I don't think the driver support is there. I've seen a lot of talk about trying to get it to work, but I haven't seen any successful reports.

AFIK, there is no CD or DVD drive that allows FAT32 formatting, or any other formatting used on a hard disk. DVD and CD drives use one of the variants of CD or DVD formats. That's why in the old days of DOS (yeah, I'm dating myself) you needed to add a special driver to get the drive to work. Those drivers got imbedded into the various versions of Windows.

As the OP said, these drives are slowly going away, so I doubt Google will work on drivers for them. Someone might, but they'd have to do it for the good of mankind. It's unlikely they could make a profit doing it.

 

[Zenstrive]

DVDs are 4GB-10GB. Flashdisks has more capacities now.

 

[ditzidaizi]

Along these same lines has anyone been able to get their thrive to read files off an android phone?
Specifically Droid x2

 

[ditzidaizi]

i was successful in transferring information from my droid x2 to and from my toshiba thrive.