How to Mount an exFAT Drive on Ubuntu and Other Linux

exFAT presents a proprietary filesystem that Microsoft created in 2006, which was first originally used in Windows operating systems and on various SD cards and USB drives. The main purpose of the existence of the exFAT filesystem is optimization for a USB flash drive.

These days exFAT presents a standard for utilized default filesystem for numerous high-capacity SD cards or USB steak drives.

On Linux, exFAT has been supported with a special implementation called fuse-exfat. In order to mount an exFAT drive on Linux, you need to install fuse-exfat.

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This tutorial shows how to install fuse-exfat and mount an exFAT Drive on Linux.

NOTE: If you are currently using a Linux kernel that is lower than 5.4, you are probably going to have issues to mount an exFAT drive on your Linux system. The Linux kernel has native support for exFAT beginning from adaption 5.4. From Kernel 5.7 new exfat driver added for larger media format, recommend using exfatprogs tool to manage exFAT filesystem.

Install fuse-exfat on Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu, Debian or Linux Mint)

Fuse-exfat is available by default in Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint repository. To install fuse-exfat, run the following command:

$ sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

This install exfat-fuse along with utilities that is being a set of exfat-utils.

Install fuse-exfat on CentOS 7 and CentOS 8

For CentOS 7 first you need to import the official GPG key for Nux Dextop repository:

$ sudo rpm --import http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/RPM-GPG-KEY-nux.ro 

Secound, install Nux Dextop rpm repository:

$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-1.el7.nux.noarch.rpm

And then, you also need to enable the EPEL repository:

$ sudo yum install epel-release

Now install fuse-exfat on CentOS 7

$ sudo yum install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

Install fuse-exfat on CentOS 8

First enable EPEL repository

$ sudo yum install epel-release

And then install fuse-exfat with yum on CentOS 8

$ sudo yum install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

Install fuse-exfat on Fedora

For Fedora you need to enable rpmfusion-free repository first:

$ sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Then install with default package manger:

$ sudo dnf install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

Mount exFAT Drive on Linux

Once fuse-exfat is installed, mount an exFAT drive using the mount command.

exFAT drive in my case is mapped to /dev/sdb1. To mount, type:

$ sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Now verify that the mount is successful:

$ mount | grep sdb

Output:

/dev/sdb1 on /mnt type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)

You can verify also with df command:

$ df -T | grep sdb

Output:

/dev/sdb1      fuseblk  125279488  5243520 120035968   5%

Conclusion

In this tutorial we learned how to install fuse-exfat, the special implementation of exFAT for Linux, and how easy you can mount the exFAT drive on Linux.