Is it possible to mount an exFAT filesystem on Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Environment
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, 6, 7, 8
Issue
- Is it possible to mount an exFAT filesystem on Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Resolution
Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not support exFAT filesystem. Therefore, it won't be able to mount exFAT filesystem in a supported method.
For an unsupported method, you can use the EPEL, nux or another third-party repository. Please research external resources for how to enable this step.
Once that repository is enabled, it's possible to install the required packages.
# yum install -y exfat-utils fuse fuse-exfat
# mkfs.exfat /dev/sdc1
mkexfatfs 1.2.7
Creating... done.
Flushing... done.
File system created successfully.
For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, there is no exFAT support in EPEL yet.
Note: Using exFAT will mean that any service or process that accesses this drive will become unsupported.
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10 Comments
Helpful only in that it told me that it wasn't supported, it's possible to do in other distros
Supported or not, here we go...
In the GUI, the device becomes available automatically. Without the GUI...
Plug in the expat drive. Note the device name. [CTRL]+[C] out of tail.
Updated steps of @Christopher Cover:
Now you should be able to mount exfat (Works from GUI too)
Confirmed this works RHEL 8
A slightly easier solution is to install exfat-utils and fuse-exfat.
Disclaimer: these are from the nux-dextop third-party repo in Romania. It has a "use at your own risk" disclaimer on its home page. It has been approved by the CentOS community. The packages are available for CentOS/RHEL 6 and 7, but not for 5.
Enable the EPEL repository if you haven't done so already, see this solution.
Enable the nux-dextop repo:
Install the packages:
To mount an exfat drive, find the partition or drive you want to mount using "cat /proc/partitions" or "tail /var/log/messages" or "file -s /dev/sd*" or similar. Exfat USB sticks are typically not partitioned, so that the drive (/dev/sdX) will likely not have any partitions under it in /proc/partitions.
or if it is partitioned,
this also works on RHEL 8 (use the RHEL 7 link)
I am just trying my hands on RHEL 7 as a developer subscription for a year. I have been able to mount exFAT drives, as all my external HDDs are formatted in exFAT.
Since Microsoft and Red Hat Inc are all buddy-buddy now, perhaps Microsoft could grant Red Hat permission to move fuse-exfat & exfat-utils from RPMFusion into EPEL & Fedora repos?
Since you wrote that, Microsoft have joined the Open Invention Network[1], which I would imaging would make exFAT support less of a legal snag?
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-invention-network-to-help-protect-linux-and-open-source/
Right now they get moolah from exfat licensing so I doubt it.