exFAT disk fails when added to fstab

General system Newbie
1

Don’t know the correct section for this so here is probably ok.

I have an external disk as exFAT. Added it to fstab to mount at system startup and chose exFAT as format. The problem is that I get this:

Using sudo mount -a

unknown filesystem type 'exFAT'.
       dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

Trying opening in Dolphin

An error occurred while accessing '931,5 GiB Internal Drive (sda1)', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting system-managed device /dev/sda1: Filesystem type (null) not configured in kernel.

Not configured in kernel? What does it mean? I never touched this and looks easy to mess it up. Besides I don’t know what it wants me to add and where because I never touched it before.

exfatprogs is installed and the disk can be mounted, but only after removing it from fstab. I don’t know why, but I need it to be exFAT.

2

After you add it to fstab, try mounting it manually and then running sudo dracut-rebuild

You probably don’t have the exfat kernel modules in your boot images.

3

I can’t mount it after adding it fo fstab, that’s the problem. Even if it fails, I ran dracut and nothing changed.

What is the solution to this? The exfat packages are installed.

4

Can I see your /etc/fstab? Make sure you are using exfat, it is probably case sensitive.

1 Like
6

Can’t believe it was this simple. Thanks.

1 Like
7

Uh, oh. It seems I don’t have any ownership to this folder. I gave me permissions when creating the linked folder but I can’t move anything without sudo mv. I don’t have any ownership over the files, either.

8

The permissions for exfat are set by the mount options you use. Did you set them to your user account?

9

I did that for it’s folder. I used this guide, only did what’s written here: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/storage-and-partitions/how-to-permanently-mount-external-internal-drives-in-linux/2022/02/

This is the fstab line:
UUID=xxxx-xxxx /home/username/Diskfolder exfat noatime,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=10,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1min 0 2
Where the options are unchanged.

10

That guide is written for a filesystem that is posix-compliant like most filesystems on Linux.

However, most filesystems that work with Windows are not posix compliant including exfat.

As a result, things like chown and chmod won’t work on them so you have to set proper mount options which you are missing from yours.

1 Like
11

Which options are for Windows systems? I pretty much only used ch commands for this.

12

You would probably want to add something like:

fmask=133,dmask=022,uid=1000,gid=1000

That assumes the uid and gid of your user are 1000 which they would be if you only have a single user created by the installer.

1 Like
13

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.