FreeAgent Theater and GoFlexTV

[king107s]

I have a FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player connected to an external hard drive via USB. There are old pictures that show up on my player under the pictures menu that are not on my external drive anymore. There are also .iso files with gibberish names that do not exist on my external drive either. I have checked for hidden files and deleted the old .Theater folder and they still exist...

Does anyone know how to delete stuff like this from appearing on the player? It almost seems like they are stored on the player itself even though there is no drive installed.

[prairiedog]

Hook up the drive to a PC and delete the .theater folder - then reconnect to the FAT+ and let it reindex the content.

The files that FAT+ creates to track the content can get corrupt.

[king107s]

Already tried that... I went on to my external drive and found the .theater folder and deleted it. When I turned the FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player back on it reindexed the files but it still had those pictures and bogus .ISO files that are not on my external drive. Unless there is a separate .theater folder on the player itself.... is there?

[prairiedog]

No, there's no storage inherent in the device - just those drives docked and attached (hard drives, usb drives).  Ensure there are no other drives attached (I know this sounds like the first step a CSR would give but I just have to say, like is it plugged in?).

Very odd.  It may be worth a cold method reinstall (takes just a few minutes) and see if it persists.  There may be others on the board here who can explain why these may persist.

[bodhi78 · Accepted solution]

It's probably because of these files were cached. Reflash FW with Cold Method FW should clear those files. Most of the time  unplugping the power cord for a long period (e.g. 30 minutes) would clear them also, depending where the cached files are. My guess is in temporary folder /tmp which is always emptied after a power disconnect.

[king107s]

I had it unplugged for a couple days during christmas and it did not clear them. I will try reflashing the firmware when I get home today.

[king107s]

Cold method reflashing of the firmware worked... Thanks for the help guys!

[king107s]

Well I spoke too soon but figured it out inspite of it! Heres what was happening....

I thought it was fixed when viewing the media player without the drive attached because all of those old files were gone. As soon as I reattached the player they were all back along with some new ones which I recognized as files recently placed on the external and then deleted which got me to thinking...

Even if you have checked to view all hidden files you wont see an even deeper set of folders... the system volume and recycler. I went into the properties and checked off to view the protected operating system files and then I could see the recyler! Sure enough, there were read-only protected sub directories in there with the files that the media player was picking up on. I changed the subdirectory's properites from read-only and then hard deleted them (shift+Delete) and did this for all present. Then I boot the media player back up with the external attached and all the ghost files were gone! Also, some of the thumbnails that didnt want to display properly were now working because there must have been a file name conflict...

This was a bit of a pain to figure out but hopefully others will be able to use this as reference later on.

[bodhi78]

Yes. We assumed you've already emptied the recycle bin after deleting the .theater folder :-)

[king107s]

See I never thought about there being a local cache because its not visible even when you enable to see hidden files... that folder requires you to check off additional view filters, so it was not immediately obvious.