USB Hard Disk causes GTV to crash

[GoogleCodeExporter]

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I am a user, not a developer. 

I try to connect an external USB hard drive (with its own power supply) to my 
SONY NSZ-GS7, it is recognized, and synced (I get 2 notifications).

A minute or so later, the GS7 freezes to a blue screen, and I have to reboot it.

If I leave the HD connected, the same sequence occurs - 2 notifications, 
followed a minute later by a freeze.

If I disconnect the HD, then reboot, the GS7 starts and runs normally.

This problem occurs with both of my Western Digital My Books - a 640 GB and a 1 
TB.

I have re-formatted both drives to NTFS and FAT32, there is no difference in 
behaviour.

The problem does not happen with USB sticks up to 32 GB.

I installed the Smart RAM Booster app from the Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rootuninstaller.ramboosterpro&
feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5yb290dW5pbnN0YWxsZXIucmFtYm9vc3R
lcnBybyJd

This program displays the total RAM and the free RAM available on the Google TV 
as a pie chart. Of the 512 MB total, there is normally 200-300 MB free, and 
30-40 processes running. When I connect the HD, I can see the free RAM rapidly 
drop to about 45 MB before the crash.

My story is told here with several helpful users attempting to solve my problem:
http://www.googletvforum.org/forum/sonys-nsz-gs7/7402-usb-hd-causing-gtv-crash.h
tml

And other users have reported the same problem with the Revue and the Co-Star:

http://www.googletvforum.org/forum/logitech-revue/4257-external-hard-drives-3-1-
a.html

http://www.googletvforum.org/forum/vizio-co-star/7207-costar-keeps-crashing-afte
r-hooking-up-wd-mybook.html

The common factor seems to be Western Digital, and the large (>500GB) size of 
the drives. Also, the problem appears to have started with the 3.1 release of 
Google TV.

This problem may not be widespread, but it is very frustrating for us who are 
affected.

I hope you can confirm and correct this problem in an upcoming release.

Thank you for your attention.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by schallen...@gmail.com on 8 Mar 2013 at 11:50

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I would like to also voice my Google TV box problem where it crashes when 
connected to a USB Hard drive. This issue plagues the GS7 as well as two 
Logitech Revues that I own. It's a mirror situation of the user above. 

I've tried close to 20 different hard drives; some portable, some desktop. For 
the record, I've connected both USB ports to power the portable hard drives. 
The manufacturers vary from Western Digital to Seagate to Hitachi. The storage 
space is from 320GB to 3TB's. The format has been tried as both FAT32 and NTFS 
and they all have experienced the same symptoms. I'm using the USB ports to 
connect the GS7 and Revue to a USB hard drive for watching movies. If I format 
a drive from scratch, fill it up with MP4,AVI and MKV movies and plug it into 
the GS7 or Revue, it will successfully read the drive. I'll let it categorize 
the media for a while, come back and after that try to play something. 
Initially, I can watch something for up to 30 minutes. Then, the screen will 
flash a few times, then freeze, either doing an automatic reboot or requiring a 
manual reboot on my part leaving only the GoogleTV picture frozen in the 
background. The second time I try to connect to the same drive, it will only 
last a few minutes before it then crashes and I have to unplug it, reboot the 
box and try it all over again. 

All USB flash drives work fine whether its through the Sony media player or the 
GoogleTV app VIMU player. The only hard drive that has ever worked with 
GoogleTV was on the Revue and that was an older firmware version using a 160GB 
ATA desktop drive formatted to FAT32.

Every hard drive that fails to work with the GS7 and the Logitech Revue plays 
all my media perfectly fine on a WDTV Live. 

It basically makes Google TV unusable with hard drive media. When I say I've 
now tested it with close to 20 hard drives, I'm not exaggerating. There is a 
problem with GoogleTV and hard drive media, so I'd appreciate if your 
engineering team could look into this and hopefully provide us with a future 
firmware fix that can solve this issue.

Thank You

Original comment by calanis...@gmail.com on 9 Mar 2013 at 6:02

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I use a USB flash drive that has the same problem. I formatted it as NTFS, and 
it worked for several weeks until one day my Logitech Revue became unstable. 
Removing the flash drive fixed the problem. This is the second time this has 
happened with the same 64MG flash drive. Mounting the drive on a Windows 7 
laptop works fine. 

Original comment by ericbwei...@gmail.com on 4 Aug 2013 at 10:53

[GoogleCodeExporter]

was there any fixes to this? 

Original comment by shawnpat...@gmail.com on 5 Jan 2014 at 9:32

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Yes, this was fixed in a subsequent release of SONY firmware.

Original comment by schallen...@gmail.com on 6 Jan 2014 at 11:31

[GoogleCodeExporter]

is there anywhere i can go to find out how to go back to that firmware?

Original comment by shawnpat...@gmail.com on 7 Jan 2014 at 11:40