Does anyone know why I'm unable to format an external disk/memory card in exFAT? Zorin gives me a few options, but exFAT is what I need.
Before you ask why not ext4, the drive will be used on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and exFAT is the most compatible in my experience. FAT32 has an individual file size limit, and NTFS doesn't play nice on Mac.
Hi @aisajib, to enable the exFAT function, this worked for me.
Open a terminal and run.
sudo apt-get install exfat-utils exfat-fuse
Source:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/750681/gui-tool-for-formating-to-exfat
Result:
How much space is on Your Card?
Great recommendation Freeway, hopefully with the installation of Exfat Utils, that will give his OS the extra power to allow for, Exfat formation.
This is also something I found online, that might be of some interest as well.
Looks like a professional app to me. I might even check it out myself. I personally, just use the tools that come with the OS. Plus, another option would be to use Gparted to format SD cards.
As soon as you said "exFat" we already knew what you were up to. I also have to make my external storages accessible to Linux, Mac, Windows and now FreeBSD.
I have been using FAT32, because I also don't have an exFAT option in Disks and I was unsure if that meant exFAT is not supported in Zorin at all? Whereas Disks did have an option for FAT. It is ok for my use case as far as size limitation goes. I also prefer it for not having to mess with permissions, since I am still not really good at understanding those things. But the thing that scares me is the case insensitivity haha. Since I have been using Zorin I became used to the luxury of being able to have 'File' and 'file' in the same directory.
I hope you update the topic with the solution you used and how well it's working. I am mainly curious that it does not seem to be native in Linux and assume it's some propriety thing?
Hi @StarTreker
GParted doesn't support exFAT, it's listed but greyed out as are several others.
Interesting sd card link, thanks.
All I can say is it works for me in Zorin.
Must admit I've only formatted a thumb drive to exFAT with Disks, not a sd card.
That shouldn't be a prob though.
Hi @Freeway
Thanks so much! Unfortunately, it didn't work. I got the following:
sudo apt-get install exfat-utils exfat-fuse
[sudo] password for sajib:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Package exfat-utils is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package 'exfat-utils' has no installation candidate
So I tried without exfat-utils and ran this:
sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse
And that downloaded and installed exfat-utils, and I was able to format in exFAT.
Thanks a lot, again!
I was pretty sure it was a proprietary thing. And GUESS WHAT? It's Microsoft!
Who could have seen this coming!
Wikipedia isn't the best as a source, but it gives you an overview. Apparently, Microsoft published its specification after 2019, but I think companies still need to pay them a licensing fee of sorts.
It's these kinds of things that frustrate me a little. I'm totally cool troubleshooting things and fixing them, but for non-tech-savvy computer users, these little quality-of-life issues on Linux add up.
I remember not using Ubuntu because Canonical couldn't bundle many codecs into it, but Linux Mint could. It was in early 2010s, so bandwidth mattered. Today, we can download whatever, but running into these things would be enough to annoy most regular people.
Sorry for the rant, but I genuinely let out a scoff when I saw exFAT was a Microsoft thing.
Oh, just to clarify, Zorin can read and write into exFAT drives. It just can't format a drive or a partition into one. (By extension, I guess it applies to most if not all distros, too)
By installing sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse I was able to get around that, so now Zorin can format a drive/partition in exFAT. Thanks again @Freeway !
Thank you this is fantastic news. I could of course format drives with another system, but I just was not sure if Zorin would be able to work with exFAT so I was using FAT32 formatted in Zorin. And now I can try the suggestions you and @Freeway have shown are needed to work for formatting.
You’re welcome! After posting here, I booted into Windows, formatted into exFAT, and booted back into Zorin (before installing exfat-fuse), and the exFAT-formatted card worked fine.
After installing exfat-fuse, I tried formatting again just to see if exFAT formatting was possible, and as you can see from the screenshot, it is!
Maybe because You tested it with an internal Drive if I see that correct and not with an USB Stick?
No issues in Pop! OS either.
Maybe there are more Formats preinstalled for this?
It is what get's installed with GParted.
But like seen here, You can install additional Packages to get the Format. So, maybe GParted doesn't bring all of them with it. I will take a Look at this tomorrow with my own USB Sticks.
I installed GParted from Q4OS's Welcome Screen App Installer, so clearly it pulls in all the necessary packages. I showed this in my Vimeo video:
32 minutes 26 seconds in.
