If you purchase the latest version of GPS navigation maps from BMW you don’t receive a disc/DVD or over the air updates, you have to download a whopping 32GB of data to put onto a USB drive to carry out the update.
That’s all ok as BMW offer a nifty BMW Download Manager that handles the download to make sure such a large file download doesn’t get interrupted. However, they cap the download speed, so what should have taken <1 hour on my 100mbps leased line took 18 hours. I left if going and when it was all done and downloaded it presented me with the following:
So I put in a 32GB thumb drive and it says there’s not enough free space because 32GB is actually only 31.25GB (1024bits in a byte and all that fun stuff) which meant the 31.38GB it said it needed is actually too much to fit on a 32GB USB drive so you need a 64GB drive. No problem, I have 64GB drives around too…
This is where the fun happens, you cannot format a 64GB USB drive as FAT32 you can only format it as exFAT or NTFS but the BMW Download manager rejects exFAT and NTFS file formats and requests FAT32 but you simply can’t have a FAT32 formatted drive larger than 32GB!
I even tried Fat32Formater 3rd party app to try and force the format of 64GB to FAT32 but the BMW Download App still rejected it.
I tried forcing a format to FAT32 using Command Prompt but that returns an error “The Volume is too big for FAT32”
So I’m currently out of ideas. I’ve managed to buy a BMW Navigation Map update but it has to have a FAT32 formatted USB drive larger than 32GB which appears to be impossible.
I will contact BMW support and see what their solution is and update here to help anybody else stuck in the same situation.
