Formatting SSD for Steam limits dashcam/sentry partition to 64GB

[rake]

When formatting an SSD drive for use with Steam, the only option presented by the UI is to have the sentry/dashcam partition sized at 64GB.
I could find no way to resize the dashcam partition since the steam partition is placed right after it, and is encrypted and cannot be moved or resized.

Has anyone found a way to get around this limitation and create a larger partition for use by sentry?

 

[Dragon2000]

Same Question? Anyway to resize? I'm using a 2TB SSD and want half Steam and half Dashcam

 

[MikkoJ]

Same here. I have 2TB Samsung T7 Shield. Would like to see a nice round number of 420 GB for sentry, the rest to Steam. Seems one solution might be, e.g. with gparted: decrypt teslasteam partition's LUKS encryption; resize; encrypt. Anyway, been playing with this a few times, but no real progress so far.
Anyone knows how to get the key/passwd for that Luks? Or how to crack it?

 

[ATPMSD]

First ensure your drive is both high-speed and high-endurance.

Ideally you should have four partitions on the drive.

• One for Sentry, it requires a folder call TeslaCam
• One for the Boombox, it requires a folder called Boombox
• One for Lightshow, it requires a folder called Lightshow
• And one for music. You can set this one up anyway you want.

I have all mine formatted as exFat, you cannot use NTFS and the use of FAT32 can be problematic.

Use the Windows Disk Manager to first delete the partition(s) on the SSD device, then create four new partitions in the sizes you wish. You should be able to find “how to videos” for Windows and Macs.

 

[MikkoJ]

Thank you @ATPMSD!

Still, my challenge is mostly about the Steam partition being encrypted and non-resizable/movable.

I have no idea if relevant and does it help, but:
Data from model s 2022/12, taken with systemrescuecd cryptsetup. No changes done to the hdd between detaching from Tesla and checking with systemrescuecd "cryptsetup -v luksDump /dev/sdb2"

Very shallow googling suggested it might not be decryptable.

Regardless, some findings in text and a screenshot.
Text:

LUKS header information
Version: 2
Epoch: 3
Label: TESLASTEAM

Data segments:
0: crypt
..
Cipher: aes-xts-plain64
..

Keyslots:
0: luks2
..
PBKDF: argon2id
..
AF hash: sha512


Screenshot:

 

[MikkoJ]

Very shallow googling suggested it might not be decryptable.

Though: trying to do something with the encrypted partition with gparted did prompt for a passphrase/key/passwd.

 

[nurusz]

First ensure your drive is both high-speed and high-endurance.

Ideally you should have four partitions on the drive.

• One for Sentry, it requires a folder call TeslaCam
• One for the Boombox, it requires a folder called Boombox
• One for Lightshow, it requires a folder called Lightshow
• And one for music. You can set this one up anyway you want.

I have all mine formatted as exFat, you cannot use NTFS and the use of FAT32 can be problematic.

Use the Windows Disk Manager to first delete the partition(s) on the SSD device, then create four new partitions in the sizes you wish. You should be able to find “how to videos” for Windows and Macs.

I did the same and its work perfectly. There are some good videos in the Youtube.

 

[ATPMSD]

Still, my challenge is mostly about the Steam partition being encrypted and non-resizable/movable.

Based on the additional information you posted I am guessing you are not using Windows, it looks like Linux? If so, maybe this will help:

How to Delete Partition in Linux?

How to Delete Partition in Linux - Introduction Linux is an open-source operating system, which is favored by many users for its robustness, flexibility and stability. One of the key features of Linux is its ability to provide users with better control over their system's resources. This is...

www.tutorialspoint.com

I am by no means a Linux guru, I just did a quick search and found the link.

 

[rake]

First ensure your drive is both high-speed and high-endurance.

Ideally you should have four partitions on the drive.

• One for Sentry, it requires a folder call TeslaCam
• One for the Boombox, it requires a folder called Boombox
• One for Lightshow, it requires a folder called Lightshow
• And one for music. You can set this one up anyway you want.

I have all mine formatted as exFat, you cannot use NTFS and the use of FAT32 can be problematic.

Use the Windows Disk Manager to first delete the partition(s) on the SSD device, then create four new partitions in the sizes you wish. You should be able to find “how to videos” for Windows and Macs.

I did the same and its work perfectly. There are some good videos in the Youtube.

Thanks, but this is specifically about the Steam partition.

Unless someone finds the encryption key, or Tesla makes a change to the "formaf for steam" operation within the UI, we seem to be stuck with a total of 2TB, pre-split of 64GB Sentry, and the rest as an encrypted Steam partition.

 

[MP3Mike]

I'm curious why you want more than 64GB for Dashcam? (Since it only stores the last hour + Sentry, and manually, triggered events.)

 

[ATPMSD]

Thanks, but this is specifically about the Steam partition.

Pretty sure if you find someone how knows Linux they will be able to remove the partition, then setup new paritions and format them. On the other hand, you could simply use this:

Amazon.com

Been working great for me for over 3-years.

 

[jingojoe]

First ensure your drive is both high-speed and high-endurance.

Ideally you should have four partitions on the drive.

• One for Sentry, it requires a folder call TeslaCam
• One for the Boombox, it requires a folder called Boombox
• One for Lightshow, it requires a folder called Lightshow
• And one for music. You can set this one up anyway you want.

I have all mine formatted as exFat, you cannot use NTFS and the use of FAT32 can be problematic.

Use the Windows Disk Manager to first delete the partition(s) on the SSD device, then create four new partitions in the sizes you wish. You should be able to find “how to videos” for Windows and Macs.

great post - can i request you add the size of each of your partitions ?
I'm concerned that I will allocate too much for one and not enough for another... :/
Sentry = 64 normal. 128 if you want to store a lot of history?
Boombox = small for short wav files. maybe 8 gb?
Light show = what is reasonable? 50 shows = approx. how many GB
Music = 128gb = more than 5000 songs - good enough for me.

 

[ATPMSD]

can i request you add the size of each of your partitions ?

Fair question! Here are some details to help you decide.

Boombox - you are not going to put much here as these are typically very small; a1 GB should be plenty. 5 GB will be overkill but is also very "safe"

Lightshow - a "big" show is maybe 25 MBs. So 50 shows at 25 MBs each = 1.25 GBs. But you cannot access different shows from the car as you need to move the show you want to use into a folder called "Lightshow." Therefore, you could keep the shows on your computer instead. Even with all the shows on the card, 5 GB should be overkill, but will be very "safe"

Music - depends on the size of your collection. If you really have 128 GB of music then that is your answer. Of course add some additional space for more music.

TeslaCam - The biggest variable here are the Sentry clips. If you keep a lot of them you will eat up a lots of space. But are you really going to look through 100+ GB of clips? Assuming you start with a 256 GB card then, based on the above, this will leave about 118 GB.


With a 512GB I would go with 5 GBs for LightShow and Boombox, 256 GB for Music, and the remaining 246 GB for TeslaCam (Sentry)

Keep in mind you can always kill the partitions and start fresh.

Have fun!

 

[snowfree52]

any update on this ? I bought a 2To SSD and would like 500Go for Steam and the rest for dashcam
Or at least is there a way to have one SSD for steam and another one for the dashcam ?

 

[MP3Mike]

I bought a 2To SSD and would like 500Go for Steam and the rest for dashcam

Why do you want 1.5TB for dashcam? It just doesn't use that much space, unless you park where there are a ton of sentry events and you never want to delete them...

 

[snowfree52]

because I bought a 2To SSD and I don't need more than 500Go for steam (I actually don't even need more than 100-200Go ...) so why not use the rest for the dashcam ?
maybe 1.5To is a lot but 64Go sure is not, I want to be able to go back in time in case of

 

[MP3Mike]

maybe 1.5To is a lot but 64Go sure is not, I want to be able to go back in time in case of

You understand that the dashcam feature only keeps the last clock hour of video, right? The only other items kept are when you manually trigger to save 10 minutes, or Sentry mode saves 10 minute clips.

So once an hour of video has been saved on the drive no additional space will be used unless you, or Sentry mode, trigger something. It isn't like a Blackview dashcam that keeps all recordings for entire drives.

 

[snowfree52]

Well I had 500Go of saved driving on the SSD I gave to my wife but I get what you mean, Anyway, I find stupid that the only choice we have is 64Go

How much space does 1h of recording take ?

 

[pdx]

Though: trying to do something with the encrypted partition with gparted did prompt for a passphrase/key/passwd.

Bumping this part of the thread. @MikkoJ curious if you ever figured out how to decrypt the Steam partition. I have some save files from a game that doesn't support Steam Cloud that I'm trying to get off the drive. I plugged the drive (Tesla 1TB SSD) in to my Steam Deck and I get the password prompt when trying to mount. I did some cursory searching for a luks brute force crack tool but haven't found anything yet.

 

[MikkoJ]

Bumping this part of the thread. @MikkoJ curious if you ever figured out how to decrypt the Steam partition. I have some save files from a game that doesn't support Steam Cloud that I'm trying to get off the drive. I plugged the drive (Tesla 1TB SSD) in to my Steam Deck and I get the password prompt when trying to mount. I did some cursory searching for a luks brute force crack tool but haven't found anything yet.

Hi pdx, unfort I didn't pursue further - yet. Based on googling I guess luks is quite tough. For now I'll resort to just deleting stuff occasionally.

My next tries will be sth like:
- usb hub: 1st init a 512 GB ssd for sentry only; add 2 TB ssd; init Steam & see what happens; maybe it's possible to select the 2nd ssd for Steam
- usb hub: probably offers a lot more options for testing
- usb hub: attach normal keyb; use some undocumented key combinations to magically arrive at a terminal to x y z and finally resize partitions
- doubt this due to luks' strong security: deploy 1 TB ssd; attach that to a linux box; copy (dd) that to a 2 TB ssd; attach 2 TB ssd to Tesla and pray
- wait for Tesla to give us more freedom.

Background as at least mp3mike showed potential interest into why enlarge:
When people start getting their disks full, esp. if using Tesla's 128 GB, they will start getting alarms. In time that will lead to a change. Being a rare occasion the fix will take years.
Anyway, I never got 'the mother of all alarms' from my S until its sentry partition got full. That event triggered me to check if anyone had enlarged the partition.