Laptops cannot access shared USB drive on AC68U while FireTV with Kodi can

[Roy2001]

I know this is a stupid question, I searched and could not find an answer, so I am posting my question here and hope someone had this issue and solved it before.

I just bought a Tmobile AC1900 and flashed it to AC68U, I tried ASUSWRT, old and new version, tried Merlin old and new version. When I said old I mean the 2 years old version came with the tutorial I found on youtube to flash TM-AC1900 to ASUS AC68U.

I have attached HDDs to a Netgear R8000 and stream music/movies from router, so I was familiar with the way to setup USB with Samba and use HDD as simple NAS.

Now with AC68U, I simply could not get it work. The router recognizes all the drives I plugged in, and I tried to enable guest or setup account, on my win10 laptop, when I try to access Network/ASUS-AC68U, it always says "\\ASUS-AC68U is not accessible......". I tried all the versions and almost gave up.

Then I turned on Fire TV and Fire TV Stick which have Kodi installed, well, the shared drives are available and I can stream without any issue.

I went back to find 2 other laptops and still don't have access. All laptops are windows 10 and they have no issues to access HDDs on R8000.

It is really weird to me, as router recognized the USB drive and share it to Fire TV's but not laptops. I also tried with DD-WRT, same result, laptops cannot access, they all worked fine with Netgear R8000 with Netgear/dd-wrt/Tomato.

Appreciate your help.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is the FireTV using DLNA to stream from the router/USB stick? Whereas, the Windows 10 PCs may be trying to access it using CIFS or SMB. Make sure that you have a username / password configured on the router to access the USB stick. (May just be the router's admin login / password combo.)