I have been troubleshooting this issue with the Pioneer 6900 for a couple of weeks now. It apparently is not compatible with the Creative Zen M 30Gig player that I have, which really upset me. So then I tried to hook my external 120 Gig USB hard drive using a power inverter and it wouldn't read any audio from that either. So I did some research and the Pioneer manual says it is compatible with FAT8, FAT16 and FAT32 and will support up to 250Gig. Well, my hard drive was set up as NTFS so I transfered all of my data to my computer's hard drive and converted it to FAT32. I put about 15 CD's on it and hooked it up to my Pioneer and it worked! The problem is, during my research, a website stated that you could only have a maximum partition size of 32Gig on a Fat32 system. I could create several partitions, of course, but the Pioneer manual says it cannot read a drive that is partitioned.
My biggest question is, is there a way to partition my entire 120Gigs to FAT32? Another website I went to said that FAT32 supported up to 2 Teryabytes. I'd hate to waste 90 Gigs of hard drive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
PS: In just the few minutes I got to play with it this morning, navigation was great on the headunit. It looks as though I'll be able to set up my music by category, then by artist, then by album. You can use the remote to navigate through all of your music even while a song is playing.