Playing music from USB hard drive hangs main display

[dlmorgan999]

I've had this problem for a while and I keep hoping that a firmware update will fix it, but I've had no luck yet. I have an external hard drive that I used in my previous car. It has my entire (legally owned) music collection (~ 11,000 songs) ripped to FLAC. It's been a while since I set this up, but I think it's formatted with FAT32 using a utility I found from a link on a post here.

My problem is that most times when I plug this drive in, after a short while (a minute or two), the entire 17" main screen freezes. I think it's actually still working but the touch just isn't responding but I can't say for certain. When this happens, I have to do a complete reboot of the main display.

Shortly after I got firmware 4.3 I was able to use this for several days with no hanging so I figured it must have been a bug. Then it started happening again and so I don't use it. Is anyone successfully using something similar to my configuration? Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

-- Dave

 

[Todd Burch]

I've had this problem for a while and I keep hoping that a firmware update will fix it, but I've had no luck yet. I have an external hard drive that I used in my previous car. It has my entire (legally owned) music collection (~ 11,000 songs) ripped to FLAC. It's been a while since I set this up, but I think it's formatted with FAT32 using a utility I found from a link on a post here.

My problem is that most times when I plug this drive in, after a short while (a minute or two), the entire 17" main screen freezes. I think it's actually still working but the touch just isn't responding but I can't say for certain. When this happens, I have to do a complete reboot of the main display.

Shortly after I got firmware 4.3 I was able to use this for several days with no hanging so I figured it must have been a bug. Then it started happening again and so I don't use it. Is anyone successfully using something similar to my configuration? Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

-- Dave

How long do you wait for it to become responsive again? It's probably indexing those 11,000 songs. Maybe let it sit for a bit to see if responsiveness comes back?

 

[JohnQ]

A point of reference which may or may not help ... I have a repurposed 250GB laptop drive that I'm using. Approximately 80GB of FLAC songs. When I plug in, it takes maybe 30 seconds to index the songs (don't know how many songs, which is probably the more relevant metric). I've never tried to do anything else while they index. I'm on 4.4

 

[scaesare]

Another similar experience: I got very similar behavior when I plugged my Android phone (I was just intending to charge).

I first noticed something was different on my phone, when I went to text somebody a picture, and my phone complained about a missing storage volume. Later the center screen started becoming slow/unresponsive. A reboot didn't fix it.

When I put 2 and 2 together, I realized that the phone must have been mounted in mass-storage mode (or some such) and there was something causing the system to not like it. Unpluggint the phone fixed the issue.

I haven't had to time to investigate again, but I'll see if perhaps it had found the music on my phone and was trying to index...

 

[dlmorgan999]

Based on Todd's response, I decided to do a test during my drive to work this morning. To help give clues about what was happening, before I plugged in the drive, I set the top half of the screen to Nav and the bottom half to "My Music and Devices".

I first plugged the drive into USB port #2. The system immediately hung. I unplugged the drive and rebooted the main screen. Then I plugged the drive into USB port #1. This time I decided to wait, and here is a timeline (times are my best guess) of what happened.

The touch immediately became unresponsive. About three minutes in, the Nav display stopped showing map data (showing all gray instead). At about four minutes, I got a red "Car needs service" message at the top of the 17" display. It was there four about five seconds and went away. At about five minutes, the same thing happened again.

Shortly thereafter, something very interesting happened. The Nav screen refreshed itself with map data, and the screen started responding to touch again. All the while though, the USB device never showed up under "My Music and Devices". This is the first time I can remember that the drive wasn't detected, but I haven't tried connecting it since I updated to 4.5 on Friday night.

I waited a couple of minutes and, as everything was still responding, I decided to plug the drive in again to USB port #2. This time, the device showed up almost immediately on the "My Music and Devices" page, and I could see the indexing status bar working. Also, I could see the hard drive activity light (on a related note, during the first pass where it was never detected, I saw occasional short spurts of drive activity, but not the usual amount that I see when indexing is occurring).

A minute or so later, it was done indexing, and everything looked happy. By this time, I was almost to work so I didn't have much of a chance to test anything else. I left the drive connected. I'll keep an eye on what happens and update this thread accordingly.

 

[dlmorgan999]

Update: I went to lunch and forgot that I had left the drive connected. During my short drive to and from the restaurant, the touch screen was unresponsive. I wonder if I have an intermittent hardware issue that's causing problems? Has anyone else seen hanging like this?

 

[Todd Burch]

Update: I went to lunch and forgot that I had left the drive connected. During my short drive to and from the restaurant, the touch screen was unresponsive. I wonder if I have an intermittent hardware issue that's causing problems? Has anyone else seen hanging like this?

If you left it connected and still had issues, I'd attribute it to something other than indexing. Even if it were indexing, it should be done on a background thread that doesn't freeze the UI.

Please send a detailed email to ownership at tesla motors dot com including the make/model of the drive so they can troubleshoot.

 

[dlmorgan999]

Thanks Todd - I'll do that. I also felt the same - even if indexing takes a while, it should not freeze the entire UI!

As one final update, today on the way home from work I discovered that the unresponsiveness persists across power offs of the car. I had left it unresponsive after lunch. When I got in the car after work, I used voice to select a nav destination. That worked fine but when I went to select the desired choice to start navigation I couldn't. I then discovered that the touch screen was still unresponsive from the lunch session and I had to reboot the 17" display again.

 

[GaryRudolph]

I have the same experience with a 64GB flash thumb drive. I had about 60GB of it used, then added one more album and it would freeze. I then proceeded to remove that album and it still froze the display. I've now reformatted the thumb drive as well as recopied the music and it still freezes. Something must have gotten corrupted in the system.

 

[Todd Burch]

I have the same experience with a 64GB flash thumb drive. I had about 60GB of it used, then added one more album and it would freeze. I then proceeded to remove that album and it still froze the display. I've now reformatted the thumb drive as well as recopied the music and it still freezes. Something must have gotten corrupted in the system.

That sparked a thought: I believe the car caches a number of things--album artwork, as well as metadata (such as song genres--I have some evidence that indicates this). It's possible that your cache is corrupt, and that's causing the problem. You might call Tesla and have them flush your cache. (Why we can't do this ourselves is a mystery to me).