First a little background as to how this happened, I had spilled a full cup of very sweet full creamer coffee on my laptop a few months ago, needless to say, it stopped working, I had my files backed up on an external USB hard drive. The laptop was a total loss, I did save its hard drive, but nothing else. So for now I am relying on 2 tablets to get me through until I can purchase another laptop.
I have the kind of router that you can hook up an external USB hard drive to and can see it through the network, I thought this would be great, I can still access all of my church music (I'm the choir director and provide all the music for my church), I can access everything I need on that hard drive. Wrong. It seems you have to use a program provided by Belkin to access the hard drive on the router, it only works on another computer, they don't have an app that works on an Android device, I was told this by a Belkin tech on their own forum...
I searched and searched for a way around this, all I found was other people seeking the same answer. Well today, after looking for a couple of weeks and installing & uninstalling app after app, I finally found an app that will allow me to see my external hard drive through the network.
DIRECTIONS
- Go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lysesoft.andsmb and install the free app
- You will obviously need to have your router set up, turned on and have an external hard drive attached and be using an Android device to access all of this
- Open the app and tap on the little plus icon in the upper right, when you first do this, could will not see the little blue icon in the picture below
- Next type in the IP address of your router where it says "hostname" , add the password if you have set one up previously (note: this is not your wifi password, this is the one you may have set up to get into the settings of your router through a browser, try leaving it blank if you didn't set up a password), and tap save at the bottom
- Now tap the new icon you see in the middle and you should see your network and the attached hard drive, mine says "My_Passport"
That's it, easy easy easy, I wanted to post this so that it could be found by other people who are struggling to find an Android app that will allow them to see a network attached hard drive.
