Following on from the guide on which drive / card to buy guide (HERE) you’ll now need to prepare your drive so that your Tesla can recognise it and write data to it.
This guide covers the minimum needed to be done to get Sentry / Dashcam to work. This does not cover having music partitions should you wish to use the drive to also play music within your Tesla.
Following the most recent update, you can now format your drive in car to make the process a lot easier.
Formatting the drive in car
- Touch the car icon
- Touch ‘Safety & Security’
- Scroll down to Dashcam
- Touch ‘FORMAT USB DEVICE’
- Click ‘Format’ in the pop up window
Done! – Very simple to do now following this update, you should now see the Dashcam / Sentry icons in your car.
Preparing the drive outside of the car
Formatting the drive / card
On a Mac this needs to be performed within Disk Utility;
1. Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility (or finding Disk Utility using spotlight)
2. Select your SSD / SD / Thumb drive from the left hand menu
3. Choose Erase from the top menu
4. Select the format as MS-DOS FAT from the drop down
5. Click Erase *In doing this, all data will be lost from this drive – double, triple check you’ve selected the correct drive before proceeding!*
On a Windows machine, this can be performed within File Explorer;
1. Open File Explorer
2. Right click on your SSD / SD / Thumb drive from the left hand side
3. Click Format
4. Choose ‘FAT 32’ from the dropdown under File System
5. Tick Quick Format, then click Start *In doing this, all data will be lost from this drive – double, triple check you’ve selected the correct drive before proceeding!*
Creating the TeslaCam folder
Once you’ve formatted your drive correctly, you now need to create a folder called TeslaCam.
On a Mac;
1. Open Finder
2. Click on your newly formatted drive from the left hand menu
3. Right click in the empty space and choose New Folder
4. Name the folder TeslaCam – either press Enter or click Save
5. Eject the drive (Eject icon next to the drive name on the left hand side)
On a Windows machine;
1. Open File Explorer
2. Click on your newly formatted drive from the left hand menu
3. Either right click on the empty space and choose New Folder, or select New Folder from the top menu
4. Name the folder TeslaCam – either press Enter or click Save
5. Eject the drive from your machine
Plug it into the car
Using only the data enabled USB ports, plug the drive in. Shortly after you should see dash cam icon appear and if enabled (and you’re parked and not at a Sentry excluded zone) you should also see the Sentry Mode icon at the top of the screen.
That’s it! – Depending on hardware levels, you can now either view saved clips within the car, or you can remove the drive once parked and review the footage on a suitable device.