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Forerunner 965 not recognised as a drive in Windows file explorer

3683954
over 1 year ago

I Have recently purchased a 965, my previous watch a fr45 displays as a hard drive with an assigned letter. This allowed me to take an image and work with the image copy for my studies, which is digital forensics. The fr965 however, displays as a connected device, once selected it shows as internal storage. The fr45 had a FAT file system though the fr965 displays as a generic hierarchical file system.

I have noticed that there is some talk elsewhere on this forum about the USB modes and I'm curious if this is related.

Any information or advice is appreciated, thank you.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I think it's the same for all Garmin units that can store music...

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to oBuTTuSo

    Yeah, music-enabled Garmins use the MTP protocol, they don’t offer direct access to the file system.

    Note that even non-music Garmins which expose the file system via USB mass storage still don’t expose *everything*. There’s an inaccessible part of the watch which stores certain sensitive settings (e.g. wi-fi passwords, bluetooth pairings) -- if you change those settings, nothing changes in the file system. Similarly, if you delete certain files, like the FIT file which corresponds to the structured interval workout that’s configured on the watch, they’ll be automatically recreated (with your custom contents, not default contents), which is further proof that there’s inaccessible writable storage on the watch.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    TL;DR for practical purposes, “Garmin mode” can be thought of as “prompt before switching to USB data transfer mode”.

    --

    The USB mode isn’t really related to the OP topic, except tangentially.

    For non-music devices, your options are Garmin and USB Mass Storage (default).

    For music devices, your options are Garmin and MTP (default).

    While the original purpose of “Garmin mode” is debatable (iirc, it may be a legacy thing which was once necessary to connect to certain Garmin desktop apps), the current behavior is as follows:

    - If you have USB Mass Storage / MTP selected (the default mode), then when you connect your watch to a computer using the USB cable, the watch will immediately go into Mass Storage / MTP mode without prompting (which means that the watch can’t be used for other things at the same time — the watch will display the familiar charging screen which won’t go away until you unplug the watch or press Back to disconnect)

    - If you have Garmin selected, then when you connect your watch to a computer, it prompts you to go into Mass Storage / MTP mode. If you select “no”, then the watch just goes into normal charging mode (as if you had connected it to a dumb USB power source), which means you can use it normally.

    Some people have claimed they *need* to use Garmin mode to connect their watch to certain USB power banks, otherwise they can’t charge their device while they use it. I’ve never seen this with my own two eyes, but I don’t know exactly what power bank(s) they used.