So, my car has a USB port built in and it works great for music, audio books, etc, until I got a new flash drive. The new flash drive wouldn’t recognize at all. So, I took it back to the store, thinking it was defective. I got a new drive, a different model and size, etc. Nothing worked. I formatted the drive, tried again. Nothing. Finally, I called the dealership and had the USB port replaced because I thought it must be bad. That didn’t work either.
After digging around the Internet, I ran across an article that explained the difference between exFAT file system, and the FAT/FAT32 file system. It seems that my vehicle (like most) will recognize the FAT/FAT32 file systems, but not NTFS, RAW, exFAT, etc.
No problem, I thought, I’ll just format the drive to FAT32.
Except that option wasn’t available on my computer, because the flash drive is greater than 32GB. Instead of partitioning the drive at 32 gigs and losing half the storage, I used this method below to format the drive to FAT32, which took a while but worked great once it was done.
- Click Start button
- Write Cmd in search box
- Click on cmd
- Type this command C:\user> format H: /FS:FAT32 (where h is your drive letter)
- Press Enter
This will take a while, it’s very slow, but it works great and you get the full storage capacity of your drive.
Another, MUCH FASTER way, is to insert the flash drive into your XBox / 365 / One, and format the flash drive to FAT32 (the default), and it’ll only take seconds.
Hope this helps someone else. It was a pain trying to figure this out.