A USB Recognition problem (and a solution)
05-29-2021, 10:07 PM
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S560 Long 4Matic (DE) MY 2018
A USB Recognition problem (and a solution)
I was struggling to understand why the car wouldn't recognise the USB flash drives I would connect to the armrest console; 2 different flash drives but COMAND would complain that "the device is not available".
It wasn't the file system (NTFS, exFAT, FAT32; I've tried them all), nor the interface (USB 2 vs 3). In the end it was the partition structure, for which there exist two variants, MBR and GPT.
MBR is the older specification, has some limitations in terms of partition size and quantity, but to this day it's still the most compatible one. GPT is the newer format and I am not surprised to see it's not supported by a 2018 car.
Also, I should note that most users won't encounter the problem, since flash drives are usually formatted to the MBR standard when you buy them and it's not too easy to change them, In my case, I used those drives as bootable operating system installation media and part of the process to make them bootable (in a UEFI system) required to change from MBR to GPT.
So, how do you change it? It's not very obvious and you will have to go through the command line prompt in Windows, but you can follow these instructions on how to do the change. Note that you will need to remove everything from the drive, so take backups first!
It wasn't the file system (NTFS, exFAT, FAT32; I've tried them all), nor the interface (USB 2 vs 3). In the end it was the partition structure, for which there exist two variants, MBR and GPT.
MBR is the older specification, has some limitations in terms of partition size and quantity, but to this day it's still the most compatible one. GPT is the newer format and I am not surprised to see it's not supported by a 2018 car.
Also, I should note that most users won't encounter the problem, since flash drives are usually formatted to the MBR standard when you buy them and it's not too easy to change them, In my case, I used those drives as bootable operating system installation media and part of the process to make them bootable (in a UEFI system) required to change from MBR to GPT.
So, how do you change it? It's not very obvious and you will have to go through the command line prompt in Windows, but you can follow these instructions on how to do the change. Note that you will need to remove everything from the drive, so take backups first!
