Help Please Help Cant see USB

[emshield]

Hello,
I have re-formated into fat32..i have downloaded file managers....i have downloaded media players....i cant read movies off of my external please help

 

[2manyPHONES]

Is it a thumb drive or a hard drive?

I believe you need to root the tab to get it to recognize external hard drives. At least I know I couldn't get mine to until I rooted and downloaded the drive mount app.

 

[kenji57]

Is it a thumb drive or a hard drive?

I believe you need to root the tab to get it to recognize external hard drives. At least I know I couldn't get mine to until I rooted and downloaded the drive mount app.

Nope, you only need root to read NTFS formatted hard drives.
I play movies from my FAT32 formatted maxtor one touch on my standard A500 no problems.

emshield, it sounds like you've done everything right so far and it should work. Are you saying the tab won't recognize the hard drive at all? Does it work OK with your PC/MAC? I had a similiar problem where the drive got messed up (I think by my seagate goflex tv media player) and had to reformat it again and start over.

 

[2manyPHONES]

Mine wouldn't read my harddrives in FAT32. But once it was rooted it was no problem.

 

[kenji57]

Mine wouldn't read my harddrives in FAT32. But once it was rooted it was no problem.

I'm just saying you don't need root to read FAT 32 USB drives. Maybe it's worth emshield giving it a try but it's probably also worth looking into the problem first.

Root isn't for everyone. I thought about rooting my A500 so I could read NTFS drives and maybe tinker with getting a 3G USB modem working. I've played around with Linux a fair bit so I feel pretty comfortable with root access, but these days I'd rather spend my time just using my tab instead of messing under the hood, so for me, it just seemed easier to reformat my drives to FAT32 and use my phone as a wifi hotspot.

If we give the impression that you have to root your tab just to do simple stuff that it should do out of the box then it could put people off.

 

[2manyPHONES]

I'm not saying rooting is for everyone but there are some things that I consider pretty simple that can only be had by rooting right now like getting netflix to work properly with 3.1 to me this should just work like it did on 3.0 but oh no why would it be that simple?

I'm not sure why my hard drives didn't work in FAT32 prior to rooting but i tried forever and everything before I broke down and rooted. But i also read everything I could find before I did it.

 

[VivaLaDroid]

Yeah , i cant get my acer to play movies off of my flash drive either, it will display the pictures on it but will not play movies,,,AVI or mp4. anyones thoughts are welcomed.

 

[kenji57]

Yeah , i cant get my acer to play movies off of my flash drive either, it will display the pictures on it but will not play movies,,,AVI or mp4. anyones thoughts are welcomed.

You will need to install a third party video player from the market. The in-built video player won't recognize avi files and is quite fussy about what mp4 files it will play.
I use MoboPlayer others have said RockPlayer Lite is good

 

[rsvcev]

I have 3 "32 GB Lexar thumb drives all FAT32". My A500 won't see anything on my 1 low profile Echo ZX 32 GB drive (tiny). The other 2 regular 32 GB thumb drives no problems. This is an A500 (3.1) right out of the box with no rooting. All 3 drives work fine on my PC and even on my 2 Series 5 Samsung LCD and newer LED TV's for playing movies and music. My idea was to fill up my low profile drive with my music/books and have it connected most of the time and us my internal 32GB and 32GB micro SD for Photo's/apps/ebooks/games... I'm not going to root no matter what. This A500 out of the box has played every .DIVX AVI, MP4 WMA MP3 I have what I wanted which is a plug & play tablet My last option is to reformat the low profile usb drive to see if it will work. I will post results when I do it. The moral of this is I would try different thumb drives before rooting. I can vouch for the BLUE LEXAR retractable 32GB thumb drives. The low profile Lexar Echo ZX for laptop/PC YES, A500 NO.

Just formatted FAT32 my LEXAR Echo ZX low profile 32GB usb stick. It NOW WORKS! Lesson is that factory format may not work. Strongly recommend this drive. Now my USB port is always
filled and my music library isn't taking up any space internally.

 

[dbldipp]

Ok you need to do all the system updates to get things to work without Rooting. I did the 3.2 update and had a file managet installed and it reads NTFS external drives of any size, and if you don't have a file manager you won't be able to see the external drives any way. there are a couple of free managers in the market that will help you out. There are some thumb drives that are not compatible with the A500 not sure why. Also after the 3.2 update you will be able to see every file and folder on your tab with your PC, add and remove foles and every thing else. Just do the factory updates and you'd be amazed at how much better your machine will work!!! NO NEED TO ROOT !!!