External hard drive showing up on Saorview box, but not my Computer

Metalhead Fred

Hi, I have a 1TB external hard drive which is now suddenly acting up a bit. The drive has 2 partitions, fat32 and NTFS and I keep my movies/tv shows in a folder called "video" on the root of the fat32 partition. I've had the drive for 7 years with no issues, but I recently moved into a new house and I connected it to a saorview free to air box, so that I could watch some videos through the TV.
It was working fine, and I left it plugged in to the box for several weeks, but when I plugged it back into my laptop, the folder containing the video files is unaccessable.
To be more specific, the error message reads:

"F:\video refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the Internet through your network, and then try again. If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location."

At first I panicked because I thought I'd just lost an absolute abundance of videos, but when I plugged it back into the saorview box - the folder is still accessable and the video files still play.

One strange thing I have noticed, is that there is a new folder on the root of the drive called ALIDVRs2, and there are 3 files inside. It looks as if somebody tried to download a TV programme onto the external drive, most likely accidently. Since I keep my videos in a folder called "video" at the root of the drive, I wonder did something happen when the saorview box tried to download onto the external drive?

So to summarize: my files are still on the drive, and accessable through the saorview box, but unaccessable via my laptop. Any suggestions?

Metalhead Fred

Perhaps I should also add, when I right-click the "video" folder in windows exploere and select "properties", it tells me that the folder is 0 bytes. But when I plug into the saorview box the video folder still contains all my videos.
So the files are there, but I can't get the folder to work properly in Windows?

jhud

You could get a ubuntu live cd\usb and run this on the laptop do not install and then connect the hard drive to see if that can see them.

Metalhead Fred

I don't have a usb stick or blank cd handy at the moment...
Just curious as to how you'd think this would help?

bonzodog2

May be malware?
https://www.usbfix.net/alidvrs2-exe/

edit: I don't vouch for the software on the site linked. I'd start with Malwarebytes.

Metalhead Fred

*********************** FIXED **********************************

I plugged the hard drive into a different free-view box thing in my parents house (Optimus, or something) and the files showed up as normal.
I was able to use this device to rename the "video" folder in the root of the drive. I literally only just changed one letter and now, BAM, the folder is functioning as normal.

I'm not sure what the solution was here, either this new box "fixed" it by itself, or it was the renaming that did it.

Thank you for your responses. Oh and I forgot to mention that I'm running Windows 7.

babi-hrse

It's formatted for saiorview box your lappytoppy doesn't know what to make of it. Easiest way to get them as a MP4 or mpeg you'd probably have to get some converter program to reduplicate over.
The laptop won't recognise the format otherwise.
How to go about that. Well that's another question one which will require some research and one that would probably break community guidelines to discuss