Hard Drive Status
Hard drives connected to Monument have two status options - Active or Inactive. This status can be viewed by going to Settings > Hard Drives using the Monument apps.
If any of your drives is labeled as "Inactive", please eject the drive(s) connected to Monument by selecting the option under Settings > Hard Drives and connect the drive(s) to a computer to perform a health check to fix certain disk problems such as file system errors and volume errors.
You can follow the steps on this guide: Hard Drive Health Check. Once completed, you can connect drive(s) back to Monument and check if the drive status is changed.
Note: If the drive is formatted HFS (Mac format), the health check needs
to be completed on a Mac computer.
Another common reason for an Inactive drive is because there are two hard drives connected and the combination of them is pulling too much power from Monument.
Note: If the drive status is "Unknown Status", it means the Monument app
can not connect to Monument to read the drive status.
In this case, please make sure the connection status is "Connected" under
"Settings" and restart the Monument app to refresh the drive status.
In order to verify this, please try plugging the drives again one at a time:
- Go to Settings > Hard Drive > Eject Drives
- Reconnect the Primary Drive
- Confirm the status is Active
- Reconnect the Backup Drive
- Confirm the status is Active
- If either drive becomes Inactive, please use a Powered USB Hub
- Connect the USB Hub to Monument
- Connect one of the hard drives to the USB Hub
- Connect the second drive directly to Monument
Comments
21 comments
I only have one drive, and for the past several days Monument has said it is inactive. How do I "activate" it?
I have a single drive and I am also experiencing this issue (1-2 days now).
Same here, drive suddently becomes inactive and monument won't id the drive. If i unplug the drive from monument and plug it into a windows computer, the drive reads just fine. Happened just today.
This post does not answer the question. I am in the line of people waiting for an answer here. Having only one drive, a recommended one and all new right from the store. Inactive and not possible to reach.
Answers, please!!
Hi, same for me, what's going wrong ? How to re-activate it ? thanks
Yes I too have one hd and for 10 days it's been saying inactive.no photos have loaded in ten days. Please answer with a solution asap.
hi,
since I wrote my post above, I took out the HD from monument and connected it to my laptop. I had access to everything and made a copy (just in case..).
I then plug in back to monument and.. it works again... very strange...
not the solution i wanted! after all monument is the backup!!!
Hi everyone,
We're updating this article with additional information.
After working on the diagnostics information shared by some users, we're seeing hard drive errors which needs to be fixed using steps on this article: https://help.getmonument.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024222293-Hard-Drive-Health-Check
Please let us know if you are still seeing the drive status Inactive.
ok i cant get it to do a health check as i get a message "windows can't access the disc"
this disc worked perfectly before it was putin the monument, where it worked seemlessly for a few weeeks. then became " inactive drive". i definitely do not want to format it again . i'm fed up with monument messing up my hard drives. thisis the secongd brand new western digital 2 tb that i have used. what is your machine doing that it keeps messing up my hd's?
Hi Dave,
Looking the screenshots, your drive appears as RAW - which means your drive has a raw file system and it in 0 bytes for its space but you still have your content on this drive.
There are possible causes that leads a file system to become RAW - major reasons:
- If you removed your drive unsafely (without using safely remove on your Windows or Eject on Monument)
- Digital device failure.
In order to fix this issue, please right click the drive on your Windows to open the properties and select "Tools" tab. Select "Repair" under "Error checking" section and select "Automatically fix the file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors". Then please select "Start". This should fix the problem.
Additionally, I'd like to note that, Monument does not have any access to change the drive properties or format your external drive.
Finally, when you're formatting your drive, please make sure you're using NTFS or exFAT file systems if you're using a Windows computer.
you're wrong about there being 2 status options. how about the third one........UNKNOWN STATUS? i get this a hell of a lot. usually when monument software can't fathom out what to do!!
Hi David,
If you're seeing "Unknown status", it means the app can not connect to Monument to get the drive status.
Please make sure the connection status under "Settings" is "Connected". Then please restart the app to see the status of the drive: "Settings">"Hard Drives".
We're also adding this information to this article. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
why do your help links not work? click on it and it goes to 'error 404'
did you know that you cannot upload files within files from a laptop? well it doesn't mention this anywhere in your instructions! "just plug it in" you say..... not quite as easy as that! i've
spent days trying to sort this out and i'm not computer trained or anything to do with I.T.
Hi David,
Can you please let us know which link you followed? I'm happy to check this.
Regarding upload problem - it looks like there's an error with the drive(s) you're using (see the red icon next to Hard Drives). This is why you're unable to upload. Can you please send a screenshot of Settings>Hard Drives to support@getmonument.com ? I'm happy to help and follow-up on this further.
Hi David,
If you're seeing "Unknown status", it means the app can not connect to Monument to get the drive status.
Please make sure the connection status under "Settings" is "Connected". Then please restart the app to see the status of the drive: "Settings">"Hard Drives".
We're also adding this information to this article. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
this isn't correct either! i bring your attention to the 2 screenshots here. the phone app is connected and i'm getting 'unknown status' i'll tell you why. it's because the laptop is telling me the monument is switched off and the phone app is slow to refresh. so you can have 2 different status remarks on two different devices at the same time!
Hi David,
I can confirm - if Monument app, either the app on your phone or on your computer, can not connect to Monument device, you will see drive status as: "Unknown Status".
Can you please let us know where do you see the message on the desktop app saying that "Monument is switched off"? Is this happening during the installation or you're seeing this message under "Settings">"Hard Drives"?
After tries, the primary harddisk cannot be detected by monument. I have copied every file on the primary drive to a PC.
How to proceed so that i can restore the function of monument? (seeing photos, albums, favorited items)
Hi Gary,
Please follow the steps on this guide to perform a health check on this drive. If the errors are fixed, please safely eject your drive from your computer and connect to Monument again. Please check if you see the drive status "Active" or "Inactive" under "Settings">"Hard Drives"
One of the common reasons that causes this issue is ejecting the drive unsafely from Monument or your computer which causes file system errors that need to be fixed using a health check on your computer. If you'd like to eject a drive from Monument, please make sure you're using the "Eject" option to unplug it.
Please drop us an email if you need anything else: support@getmonument.com We're happy to help.
I just had a problem like this. I have been running my backup drive on a powered usb hub with no issues up until now. Monument says backup drive is inactive. I have 2 of the same usb hubs, just for fun I swapped them out, works fine now.
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