Impossible to Write on an External SSD in exFAT with Ubuntu

You just connected your exFAT formatted external SSD to your Ubuntu machine, and surprise: you can’t write to it! Don’t panic, this is a common and easy-to-solve problem. By default, Ubuntu does not support the exFAT format. This article will guide you through the steps needed to add this support.

Step 1: Add the “universe” repository

Ubuntu offers a repository called “universe” which contains a large amount of open-source software maintained by the community. To access these packages, we first need to add this repository.

sudo add-apt-repository universe

This command allows Ubuntu to include the “universe” repository in its software sources. This is a necessary step to access the packages we need for exFAT support.

Step 2: Update the sources

Once the repository is added, you need to update the list of available packages on your system.

sudo apt update

This command fetches the latest information from the repositories and updates your package list so that Ubuntu knows where to get the latest software.

Step 3: Install exFAT support

The next step is to install the necessary packages so that your system can read and write to exFAT disks. To do this, install exfat-fuse.

sudo apt install exfat-fuse

exfat-fuse is a module that allows the Linux kernel to understand the exFAT file system.

Problem with exfat-utils

At this point, you might be tempted to also install exfat-utils, which in previous versions of Ubuntu allowed managing exFAT disks. However, if you try to run this command:

sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

You will get an error message indicating that exfat-utils has no “installation candidate”. Indeed, since Ubuntu 22.04, exfat-utils has been replaced by another package.

Solution: Install exfatprogs

The new method to add exFAT support in recent versions of Ubuntu is to use exfatprogs. I found this solution on an Ubuntu blog, thanks to a response posted by a user named christian_js on August 5, 2022.

sudo apt install exfatprogs

exfatprogs replaces exfat-utils in Ubuntu 22.04 and later versions. This package allows managing exFAT file systems (formatting, checking, etc.).

Step 4: Connect your disk

After following all these steps, reconnect your external SSD. You should now be able to read and write to your exFAT formatted disk without any issues.

Enjoy 😎

AlexInTech