External USB drive connected to Car's Multimedia system

Anchundan · 4 Oct 2011 at 04:57

Not sure where to post this - Motors, Storage Drives, Sound City or here!

The factory fitted multi-media system in my car accepts a USB stick. I have been playing music directly from my 4MB USB stick (formatted as FAT32) with no issues.

I now have a redundant external 500GB USB drive, which I have also formatted to FAT32 (was NTFS) but it isn't recognised. It takes it's power from the USB slot - do you think there is not enough power to power it up? It's light does energise, it's just not recognised.

tigerstyle · 4 Oct 2011 at 06:58

not enough power.

Luke · 4 Oct 2011 at 07:33

Does it spin up? Paybe a powered one would work if you could wangle to power somehow.

Chihero · 4 Oct 2011 at 09:40

i think your player may also have a maximum Size of harddrive that it will recognize

i think some are even as low as 32GB Max

Anchundan · 4 Oct 2011 at 11:49

hmmm, thanks for the replies. I think maybe I'll sack it and just get a 32GB USB stick. I can pick up a Kingston G3 32GB out here for £26.

Anchundan · 6 Oct 2011 at 02:32

Chihero said:
i think your player may also have a maximum Size of harddrive that it will recognize

i think some are even as low as 32GB Max

This might be it. I just reformatted on a 32GB partition, and it's now working. I originally initialised the disk in GPT layout, but this time I used MBR layout. I have no idea what the difference is. Or whether this was the problem.

I will now reformat in MBR layout, FAT32, to the full 500GB and see if it is still visible.