Having Troubles Reading the Hard Drive? 

 If your device is having difficulty reading your newly installed hard drive and all connections are properly made, it may need to be manually formatted. Most Amcrest NVRs and DVRs require the hard drive to be formatted to FAT32 which is standard for most devices. To format the hard drive, remove it from the device and hook it up to your computer. Once the hard drive is installed and is being properly read by the computer, download and install the GUI Formatting Tool provided below. 

GUI Format Tool.exe

(80 KB)

Please note, the GUI format tool is for Windows users only, however, Mac users can also format a hard drive to FAT32 using the Apple disk utility which comes standard on macOS. For more information on how to format the hard drive using the Apple disk utility, click here.

Note: 32GB is the maximum partition size limit using the FAT or FAT32 file system format. That said, FAT/FAT32 can actually format up to 16TB hard drives and most operating systems support up to 2TB.

Formatting Using the GUI Format Tool

Once installed, locate the hard drive you just installed on your computer. 

Note: Uncheck the Quick Format checkbox if you would like a full format of the hard drive. Formatting the hard drive will remove all information and data from the drive and format the drive to FAT32.

Click Start in the FAT32 format menu and allow the program to format the hard drive. Click OK to continue. 

Allow the program to finish formatting the hard drive. When finished, click the Close button to close the program.

The hard drive has now been properly formatted to FAT32. Remove the hard drive from the computer and insert it back into your device. When properly installed, the device should be able to locate and use the hard drive and all data would have been removed.