@brianman,
I wrote this guide with the firmware that had the very first release of TeslaCam. At the time, it appeared that many people were having corruption problems, and it seemed that the manner of formatting made a difference.
With the later versions of the firmware, many bugs in the USB and FAT32 write logic and drivers in the Tesla firmware have been fixed, and I no longer believe the choice of formatter makes any difference. I'm 80% sure that the single biggest factor in any corruption that people are still experiencing at this point is the result of the quality and speed of the USB drive. Slower and older drives are more likely to have problems.
I think any FAT32 formatter will work properly. I'd use the Windows built-in format to prepare any partition up to 32GB. If you want a larger partition (especially necessary if you're going to use Sentry Mode a lot), then I see nothing wrong with the 3rd-party formatter I linked to in the original post.
It would be interesting to compare two images to see if there is indeed any meaningful difference in the two formatters. But even if there is, we have no evidence that those differences would cause problems. For example, in the master boot record (MBR) are some values for the count of cylinders, heads, and sectors. Those values are all but ignored by any modern operating system in favor of the LBA (logical block addressing) numbers. If one formatter puts one set of CHS values in the MBR, and the other puts a different set, we have no idea if that would actually affect the Tesla firmware or not. It shouldn't, but who knows?
I wrote this guide with the firmware that had the very first release of TeslaCam. At the time, it appeared that many people were having corruption problems, and it seemed that the manner of formatting made a difference.
With the later versions of the firmware, many bugs in the USB and FAT32 write logic and drivers in the Tesla firmware have been fixed, and I no longer believe the choice of formatter makes any difference. I'm 80% sure that the single biggest factor in any corruption that people are still experiencing at this point is the result of the quality and speed of the USB drive. Slower and older drives are more likely to have problems.
I think any FAT32 formatter will work properly. I'd use the Windows built-in format to prepare any partition up to 32GB. If you want a larger partition (especially necessary if you're going to use Sentry Mode a lot), then I see nothing wrong with the 3rd-party formatter I linked to in the original post.
It would be interesting to compare two images to see if there is indeed any meaningful difference in the two formatters. But even if there is, we have no evidence that those differences would cause problems. For example, in the master boot record (MBR) are some values for the count of cylinders, heads, and sectors. Those values are all but ignored by any modern operating system in favor of the LBA (logical block addressing) numbers. If one formatter puts one set of CHS values in the MBR, and the other puts a different set, we have no idea if that would actually affect the Tesla firmware or not. It shouldn't, but who knows?