Wii and external hard discs.

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, this is not really about a bricked Wii, but repairing something that the Wii may have bricked. I couldn't seem to find the forum where I should ask this... (Could a mod move this if it's the wrong place?) But I hope someone could help me.

Recently I installed the Homebrew Channel and MPlayer-CE so that I could watch videos on an external hard drive. It worked fine for a while... But when I went to browse an 8 hour file (I compiled all of Red VS Blue in Movie maker), the thing crashed and restarted my Wii. (Browsing small sections of file were fine, it crashed when I skipped about 45 minutes) I tried loading the Homebrew channel, it still worked, but MPlayerCE would freeze every time I started it up. After a little bit of troubleshooting, I found out it would work fine if I unplugged the external hard drive. Worried that I wrecked my hard disk, I plugged it into a Vista system... It worked just fine, so I brought it to my computer (XP) for troubleshooting...

What? Where is the drive? It didn't appear in My Computer, Disk Management, or even in the Device Manager. Just to make sure something didn't happen between the trip from the Vista and the XP, I plugged it into the Vista machine. It still worked. What the heck?

Anyone have any clue what the problem could be? It has me baffled, I have tried pretty much everything.

Thanks all. :)

Can you try it in another USB port on the XP machine? Or try something else in the same USB port? Just to make sure it isnt the USB port is causing the problem.

Yeah, other USB drives work on both the Wii and the XP. I guess this is more of a question of how the Wii USB drivers work for external devices. Does anyone know if they set any modes while reading from USB? :\

I would just copy the files from the external hard drive to my computer, and reformat. (I guess FAT would probably be best for Wii because of libfat) But the thing is about 3 times larger than my main PC's hard disk. :o

Oh yeah, it was originally formatted as NTFS. Are there any official drivers for this, or is this only a problem with MPlayerCE?
(Now that I think about it, this would probably fit into the Homebrew forum better than Fixmii.)

Yeah I don't think that any apps (except warez fail) work well with NTFS. So a reformat should fix the problem. You would need it to be formatted as FAT.