WD Passport not recognized by Sony BDP-S580

[channelgirl]

I have a Sony Blu-ray Player BDP-S580 that works great, plays disks, streams Netflix, plays movies on USB flash drives. Bought a 1TB WD My Passport, wiped it, formatted it to FAT32 GPT, put some MP4s on it. Plugged it into the player's USB drive, get error message "USB device (front) unknown, LUN 1." Repeated the process, formatted it NTFS this time, still not recognized. Tried again, formatted it back to FAT32, no errors on laptop, blu-ray says it is still "unknown." A friend suggested it might just be a bad cord, but it's worked well enough plugged into my laptop. I was also told that all this was easy as pie... Please advise, has anyone out there made this work? How to do it? Thanks!