Now bear in mind that this is different (oh so slightly, but still significant) to what x0lliex is saying above, which does appear to be working for me. The tools are easy to use, yes, but the process is important. The point that Mac users have zero problems everywhere leads me to believe that it might be an issue with DISKPART vs the disk mgmt tool, or specific use of cluster sizes in the format utility.
I've been using various filesystems, including several variants of FAT, for decades; I work with computers for a living; and I wrote the
GPT fdisk partitioning tool. That said, I'm not an expert on modern Windows. Nonetheless, I have a better-than-average understanding of the problems under discussion. When you prepare a USB drive for use, you will normally do two things with it, although many tools fold these two things into one operation:
- Partition it -- This operation involves writing very simple data structures that divide the disk into parts. (Even a disk with a single volume is usually partitioned -- it's just got one partition on it.)
- Create filesystem(s) on it -- This operation places more complex data structures inside each partition you created in the previous step. In the case of a TeslaCam partition, the filesystem must be FAT (normally FAT32).
There are variants on and exceptions to this rule, such as unpartitioned floppy disks and disks that use logical volume management (LVM) setups; but for the case of a disk with separate partitions for music and TeslaCam, this description applies.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that the Windows DISKPART tool performs the partitioning task, but
not the filesystem-creation task. To create a filesystem in Windows, you use a separate command-line tool, such as a standard Windows tool called FORMAT; or you can use a GUI disk management tool that performs both steps from one (GUI) operation.
Microsoft has chosen to limit the size of FAT32 filesystems that its tools create to 32GiB. I believe this is true both of FORMAT and the GUI Windows tool. Presumably this is done to encourage the use of more advanced filesystems like NTFS and exFAT, but neither of those options works for a TeslaCam directory, so Windows users who want to create a bigger-than-32GiB TeslaCam directory need a way around this limitation. Third-party tools for Windows are usually not so limited, so you can create bigger FAT filesystems with them. (The FAT data structures themselves support a FAT32 volume size of up to 2TiB, according to
Wikipedia; Microsoft's much lower limit is purely arbitrary.) Note that the Windows OS can use bigger-than-32GiB FAT filesystems; it's only the tools used to create the filesystem that are so limited. As noted many places, the standard tools used to create FAT filesystems in other OSes, such as macOS and Linux, are not normally limited in the way Microsoft's FORMAT program is.
The first post in the
thread that's referenced here and elsewhere explicitly says the following, which may be causing confusion:
SomeJoe7777 said:
You will need the 3rd-party
Fat32Formatter utility to format the music partition, as Windows cannot format a partition larger than 32GB in FAT32. Do not use this utility to format the TeslaCam partition, this is what causes the corruption that stops the dashcam from working.
I don't know what the source is for the claim that third-party Windows tools produce filesystems that are more prone to corruption. I haven't seen this claim in recent posts. I have seen claims that Tesla has done something in the last few months to reduce the frequency of corruption. One observation I have is that there is, AFAIK, no way to unmount (aka "safely remove," "eject," or similar terms) a USB drive from the Tesla's UI. You can stop recording, but that's not the same thing. Any modern OS caches disk writes, which means they may be held in RAM for microseconds, seconds, minutes, or longer before being written to disk. If you stop recording and pull the disk out before the computer has flushed its cache, the result will be filesystem damage. Perhaps Tesla has reduced the time before it flushes its cache; or perhaps it's added a regular filesystem check to its operations, which would catch and correct filesystem damage before it gets bad enough to interfere with recordings. You can also run filesystem checks yourself (on your desktop or laptop computer) whenever you pull the TeslaCam disk.
I mostly use Linux, so my TeslaCam partition has a FAT32 filesystem created with Linux's mkdosfs utility. This has worked fine for me in the three months I've owned my Model 3. I can't comment on any Windows-specific utility, although there is a
Windows port of mkdosfs, if you want to try it.
In any event, I believe that the explicit advice (quoted above) against using third-party partitioning tools is wrong. At a minimum, following this advice makes it impossible to use a bigger-than-32GiB partition for TeslaCam. Of course, there may be bugs in certain specific tools; but third-party FAT-creation tools have existed for decades, so I'd expect such bugs to be few and far between. I'd speculate that mistaken beliefs about correlations between filesystem corruption and third-party tools might have originated because of coincidental associations -- with a small sample size, a person might see a pattern in a random effect. That is, however, pure speculation. If somebody has data to back up a correlation, I'd be interested in seeing it. One more point to consider is that Tesla's computers run Linux, and in other contexts, Linux reads FAT filesystem created by
everything, so it would be odd for a Linux-based computer to have problems with third-party FAT filesystems but not with Microsoft-created FAT filesystems.
