I stumbled across this thread while I was having very similar issues after taking delivery of my (used) 2019 Model 3. It took me a while to figure out a solution, but I finally got my sentry mode and dashCam to work. I thought I should share my solution here in case anyone else lands on this thread too.
Car info:
2019 Model 3 Dual Motor LR
Version number (at time of sentry/dashcam issue): 2021.36.5.1
Brand new Samsung t7 1tb ssd
The bug/symptoms:
After I took delivery of the car, I purchased a new SSD for sentry/Dashcam. When I would plug the SSD into the car, I went to the car‘s menu and formatted the drive. After the formatting was complete I would see the correct dashcam icon in the top right of the screen. All seems good. But as soon as I would try to launch the cam viewer or if an event would happen that should save the to SSD, the icon would disappear. No matter what I would do, the only way to get the cam back was to reformat the SSD. Even after doing so the problem continued.
So I decided to format the SSD on my computer but still had the same issue.
The Cause:
I do not fully understand why, but after going through several other unrelated posts, I believe I have found some sort of bug. It seems like when the car reformats the SSD, it is not creating the additional directories required for sentry/Dashcam to save footage properly. And thus has no files to access when reading/writing data to the SSD.
How to solve:
These are the step I took to fix my issue. I am working on Mac, so these steps may different for you.
- Connect your SSD/Hard drive to a computer
- Reformat your drive (I used Disk Utility) with a format: MS-DOS FAT & Name: Tesladrive
- Once the drive has been formatted, open the drive on your computer and ensure there is a directory (folder) called “TeslaCam”. I have also read that sometimes it needs to be “Teslacam”. (no quotes). The first worked for me.
- Once that is complete, safely eject your drive and you should now be good to use the drive in the car.
Again, this is what I was able to do to solve the issue for me. Please remember that if you use Windows, your process may be different. Hopefully this will help anyone else having similar issues!