topic Re: After restart, base station complains that USB disk needs formatting, but never formats in Arlo

After restart, base station complains that USB disk needs formatting, but never formats

Purple_Silicon — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 20:07:10 GMT

I had some trouble getting the base station to talk with the camera. As a troubleshooting step, I decided to restart the base station. Before I restarted it, the USB disk was reported as good (in green). After the restart, magically, the USB stick was reported as "Requires Formatting" (in yellow). So I tap on "FORMAT USB DEVICE". The formatting process is lightning fast! Except, it does nothing. The USB disk is still (again?) reprted as "Requires Formatting":

I shall emphasize that this happened after restert. Before, the USB disk was perfectly fine.
What to do?

Re: After restart, base station complains that USB disk needs formatting, but never formats

StephenB — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:48:15 GMT

Maybe try connecting it to a PC and formatting it there.

Re: After restart, base station complains that USB disk needs formatting, but never formats

Purple_Silicon — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 12:12:55 GMT

I removed the USB drive and inserted it in a PC, and guess what? It's FAT32-formatted and it has an Arlo directory on. In other words, there was nothing wrong with the USB drive at all.

How do we report bugs to Arlo?

Re: After restart, base station complains that USB disk needs formatting, but never formats

Purple_Silicon — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 13:54:19 GMT

Since I proved that there was nothing wrong with the USB disk - it was FAT32-formatted all along, this is simply an Arlo (VMB4500) firmware bug. There is no way to get rid of the bug, but you can get rid of the error message by unpluggin and then re-inserting the USB disk.