exFAT 1TB USB3 portable storage detected but not recognised

English Hardware
1

Hi. I bought a 1 TB Toshiba USB3. It says in Windows that it’s an exFAT filesystem. However, I can’t mount it in Linux.

My computer is a bit old and has no USB3 connectors, just USB2.

I have executed modprobe as

leap422:/home/john # modprobe usb-storage

I installed exFAT packages fuse-exfat and exfat-utils

A listing of /dev says that sdc is detected, like this:

leap422:/home/john # ls -l /dev | grep sdc
brw-rw----  1 root disk      8,  32 May 19 16:12 sdc
brw-rw----  1 root disk      8,  33 May 19 16:12 sdc1

A mount attempt goes like this:

leap422:/home/john # mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1
mount: /dev/sdc1: can't read superblock

I’ve run gparted to see it it would trigger a response. Gparged just sits churning in infinite confusion.

Any suggestions towards getting it attached would be great.

2

Why not simply

fdisk -l

But when it is sdc, then the system already detected that it has one partition (though we can not tell if it covers all available space, seems however likely).

When you just bought it, there is nothing on it I assume. Are you really fond of having that exFAT file system on it? Do you need it for something? In other words, what are you going to use it for. I e.g. would most probably create an ext4 on it and most probably would not be interested in what the manufacturer had put on it because he wants to be kind to MS Windows users, not me. But again that depends on the need.

PS I am not that good in USB2 vs. USB3, but would assume that a USB3 device would run on a USB2 port, being downwards compatible.

3

What about listing fdisk? Yes indeed, here it is:

leap422:/home/john # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x95aa95aa

Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1        2048 976773167 976771120 465.8G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/sda: 111.8 GiB, 120034123776 bytes, 234441648 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x01d237d8

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1            2048   1026047   1024000  500M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2         1026048  82886655  81860608   39G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3  *     82886656 234440703 151554048 72.3G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        82888704  89192447   6303744    3G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6        89194496 152102911  62908416   30G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       152104960 234440703  82335744 39.3G 83 Linux

The sda is my SSD dual systems of Windows 10 and then Leap 42.2. The sdb drive is for storage of stuff. No sign of sdc.

exFAT was on it when it arrived by mail order. I’m not keen on that. I am going to attach it to my router to server multimedia. But my router doesn’t recognize exFAT. My router does recognize NTFS and FAT32.

4

Hi John. For exFAT support fuse-exfat is your friend…

zypper install fuse-exfat exfat-utils
5

Hm,strange. You have /dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1 created, meaning that the system detected the device and that udev read the partition table and created the device files. But fdisk does not mention it???
I do not understand what the implications of that are.

Personally I would not bother about that exFAT or try to see if I can mount it somewhere. I would try to make a new file system on /dev/sdc1.

Can you make an NTFS file system on openSUSE? I try to stay as far away from non-linux as possible, thus I would not know. But for a Linux file system things like mkfs and friends should work.

6

Can you make an NTFS file system on openSUSE? I try to stay as far away from non-linux as possible, thus I would not know. But for a Linux file system things like mkfs and friends should work.

There is mkfs.ntfs available for this.

7

That’s a good idea, I tried it and it tried but failed while writing a statement about a fatal hardware error. That’s a bit of a worry.

8

Oops. I am not that good in hardware :(.

You could try a

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4096

to check if the device can be written to from start to finish. That will also erase the partition table.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4096

will not touch the partition table, but only the partition.

It will take time for 1TB (using larger bs= as blocksize may speed it up).

Not destructive would be

dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null bs=.....

It will read all of the disk.

But, as said, I am not particular good at hardware problems, maybe another one has a better advice.

9

Thanks for suggestion, here’s the results:

leap422:/home/john # dumpexfat -s /dev/sdc
dumpexfat 1.2.4
ERROR: failed to read from '/dev/sdc'

So dumpexfat said sort of: nothing here. So I tried to install the exfat filesystem (below)

leap422:/home/john # mkexfatfs /dev/sdc
mkexfatfs 1.2.4
Creating... done.
Flushing... ERROR: fsync failed: Input/output error.

It worked according to “Creating … done” but not without problems (problems like the"ERROR").

So I plugged it into my windows 10 and it is detected there but does not mount. I’ll fiddle in windows for a while and report that progress if any.

10

To me the above sounds (but I am not sure, not knowing about that exFAT stuff) that you created something on sdc, (the disk, thus overwriting the partition table) not on sdc1 (the partition with the presumed exFAT file system).

I do not know much (if anything) about MS Windows, so I am not sure it will detect an exFAT file system on a “whole disk” vs. a partition on a partitioned disk. (On Linux that is certainly possible, though seldom done).

11

I went back to Windows disk management tool and the verdict there is that I have a “931.51 GB RAW” file system which they say is a “Healthy primary partition”. That’s promising.

I’m going to try to install an instance of Knoppix on it (Knoppix is live Debian). I choose Knoppix because Knoppix installs on flash drives. My hope is that the installation of Knoppix will create valid partitions that work. Those partitions can then be cleaned of all files so that the drive becomes once again useable as a storage container. I do this because my attempt at creating a partition has failed (about 10 times).