MI Box S external drive WITCHCRAFT

by ghosstss

Hi everyone, just got brand new MI Box S yesterday trying to hook up an ext HDD to it to watch my own content. I am sitting here with 3 different HDDs which all show up as ''corrupted USB drive'' whenever I hook them up. Tried formatting them in either exFat and NTFS, but same issue upon connection. I just tried a shitty 8gb thumb drive (ntfs) and it magically connects without any problem. MORE THAN THAT! all of the 3 HDDs show up in the ES File explorer and from there I can easily navigate through the content and even play it by choosing both VLC and KODI.

I dont really want to use ES file explorer, I just want one of the HDDs to get mounted properly so both VLC and KODI will see the drives. What am I doing wrong and why is it so frustrating?

GoodMerlinpeen

If you find a fix let us know, I wasn't able to do anything with an external drive except format it as extended storage to use as part of the internal storage system.

caduber

same here

ewok-partisan

You have to go into device storage on the mi box and format it as removable storage or the device won’t read it.

starslayer74

I had a mibox, and was a huge proponent of it for years - after the Oreo update, I had a lot of different small issues, all of which I could live with, UNTIL it started to have external drive issues - I thought it was my drive at first (a thumb drive) so I bought a new drive, same thing, and then I bought a USB 1TB drive, same thing. The mibox KILLED the drives and in the case of the thumb drives, it completely locked them into read only mode so they are useless and cannot be fixed.

Fortunately I was able to reformat the 1TB drive.

I hate to say it, but I upgraded to the shield and it worked without any problems, although I did give up the 1TB to use it on my PS4 and I bought a SSD to use with the shield because it was faster and improved my overall setup.

TheTrueSurge

What kind of external HDD is it? I believe that you need an additional power source for larger drives as the USB port won’t be enough to power it.

pjgowtham

Not really a fix, but a dedicated hard drive connected to the router for media purposes is life changing. I set up transmission torrent client on my openwrt installed router. I use ftp to play movies and shows. No need to connect or search for the hard disk. Files are always available, no matter what devices i use, with speeds matching direct connection. I have also set up samba for windows use, but i find ftp better for streaming purposes through wifi.

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Possible fix : I would suggest you to disable usb debugging and try hooking up the hard disk again.

ghosstss

Already read somewhere about usb debugging but couldn’t find that anywhere in the settings, could you please elaborate? I searched all settings throughout-fully but nothing similar that I could’ve find

elister

Do your hard drives get power over USB? If so, it wont work until you connect them via a powered USB hub. This is probably why the thumb drive worked, its low powered and the player normally doesn't have a problem providing that power, but for a HDD it needs a bit more than what the media player can provide.

scottISdead

Never had any luck with external drives on the Mi Box. They work just fine on the Jetstream and the Shield.

haojiezhu

ES File Explorer probably uses its own USB OTG driver. Basically if the native OTG driver coming with Mi Box firmware isn't compatible with your hard drive, your option is to try 3rd-party OTG driver and see if it's compatible. Many apps offer 3rd-party OTG driver, like X-plore, MiXplorer, Solid Explorer, or Paragon exFAT/NTFS.

boringasblue

Hi, do you have any update on this issue? Were you able to find solution?