Proper way to format USB thumb drive?

[AC1K]

for those of you that need to format your USB drive here is a really good tool (windows and CDROM Boot available)

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

it can even partition usb drives or remove them, format in any file format you wish.

im guessing by the responses here you need to do FAT32. If you are using the tool for other drives, NTFS defaults to "logical" partitioning, most people want "Primary" if you are making 1 big drive.

 

[jpasqua]

I realize that this is an old thread, but ...

One more tip that may have been mentioned elsewhere: special characters in file and folder names can cause the Model S to choke. When a flash drive is inserted, the Model S scans it and processes the contents. It appears to give up if it finds characters it isn't expecting. For example, I had a folder name that started with an underscore (as in _Artist Name) and that was enough to cause the scan to fail.

At this point my 64GB drive is working fine and I can see my entire iTunes music library.

 

[elreydetodo]

I'm also having a lot of trouble getting any thumb drive to work in my MS. I have a 64GB SanDisk pen drive that worked well enough initially... Then I decided to try to put ext4 on it to resolve some problems I was having with unicode characters. It turns out this probably wouldn't have helped anyway (probably unicode limitations in the MS firmware or the ID3 library it's using), but ext4 just caused the main computer to crash and reboot every time I tried to read it. So I re-formatted, and never again have I been able to get it to read this pen drive.

At this point I've re-partitioned the drive (with MBR, not GPT partition structure), tried ext3, ext4, NTFS, and right now I'm re-doing FAT32 (to be tested in about an hour...). So far nothing I've done make the UI give any indication that it knows there's a pen drive inserted. It pretends like I've done nothing. The drive works fine in Windows and Linux desktops, but the car ignores it totally. I'm getting pretty frustrated.

Any ideas?

 

[aaronw]

I tried a Linux ext4 formatted drive and it works beautifully.

 

[widodh]

I tried a Linux ext4 formatted drive and it works beautifully.

awesome! I'm a Ubuntu user and I dislike NTFS and FAT

I'll take one with me to my testdrive next week!


Sent from my phone, so my apologies for typos.

 

[Rodolfo Paiz]

There are tools that can format larger drives to FAT32, even up to 1TB (maybe even more but have never tested that)
Like this one: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Yay! Thank you, Luke!

I bought a Kingston G2 128GB USB drive specifically to use in the Model S, and I was extremely disappointed to have it be summarily ignored by the car. It was formatted in exFAT, and Win7 is deliberately crippled and does not support FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB so it would only allow me to choose between exFAT and NTFS... and I knew NTFS wasn't going to work. So I've been working with two smaller drives until now. Thanks to you, I just used that tool to reformat my USB drive as FAT32 and I'm now resynchronizing my music library. Thank God for MediaMonkey.

- - - Updated - - -

Theoretically, FAT32 has a maximum volume size of 32GB. If that's really true then I don't see how it would be possible to use a USB key larger than that. I hope I'm missing something.

No, it's not really true. FAT32 has a real theoretical limit of 2TB per volume. It's Windows that chooses not to support volumes > 32GB.

 

[aaronw]

NTFS is supported by Linux, especially in read-only mode and there is some support for exFAT. The biggest problem with exFAT is it is undocumented and patent encumbered and pretty much Windows only (and recent MacOSX). NTFS may also have issues since like exFAT it is not well documented and much of the work was based on reverse engineering. FAT32 is really the only universal standard at this point, though it is not a very good filesystem. It's too bad that Microsoft had to force through exFAT as the standard for SDXC cards 64GB and larger since it requires anybody who wants to use them has to pay to license it so open source software won't touch it. While there are other simple standard filesystems that would work fine Microsoft and Apple aren't about to support them and writing 3rd party filesystems for Windows is not going to cut it.

 

[brianman]

Win7 is deliberately crippled and does not support FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB

I'm no TEG, but I couldn't find any information that supported this assertion ("deliberately crippled"). Can you provide a link? Thanks.

Related note: For those that like to keep Wikipedia current, feel free to update the FAT32 topic. This is apparently incorrect:

Even though the Windows 7 operating system has FAT32 support, the ability to use it as a hard drive formatting option has been artificially limited within the GUI by Microsoft, which only allows the user to choose between exFAT and NTFS. Users attempting a FAT32 format must execute the format command through a Command Prompt with administrator authority, using the /FS:FAT32 switch.

File Allocation Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1. Incorrect: The GUI limits it for > 32GB not entirely.
2. Incomplete: Using the format command from the Command Prompt appears to enforce the 32GB limit as well.

 

[jpasqua]

FYI: I upgraded to 4.3 overnight and when I tried to access my USB media this morning, it rescanned and then worked fine.