Unable to See External USB Disk Drive Attached to the Intel® Entry Storage System SS4000-E

Documentation

Troubleshooting

000008261

09/05/2017

What is the issue?
External USB disk drives may be indicated as unavailable in the storage manager software and not able to be used:

External USB disk drive unavailable


What is the cause?
This occurs if the external USB disk drive is formatted as NTFS. The Intel® Entry Storage System SS4000-E does not recognize NTFS file systems.

Typically, Windows* will format disk drives larger than 32 GB with NTFS. Some Windows versions will not let you select the format type within the operating system GUI Disk Management screen.

When an external USB disk drive is attached to the Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E, the system will look for an ext3 file system, an ext2 file system, and then a FAT file system on the USB device. If none of these file systems are found, the system will not mount the USB disk.


Workaround:
Be sure to use USB external hard disk drives from the Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E Tested Hardware & Operating System List for best possible compatibility.

The Windows* command line will enable FAT32 formatting. From the Windows command line, type:
format (Drive letter): /FS:FAT32

There are also a number of freeware/shareware FAT32 formatting utilities available.