How to Mount an exFAT Drive on CentOS 7

exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) is a proprietary Microsoft file system optimized for flash memory devices such as SD cards and USB flash drives. It was designed to replace the old 32bit FAT32 file system that cannot store files larger than 4 GB.

The exFAT file system is supported on the latest versions of Windows and macOS operating systems. CentOS, like most of the other major Linux distributions, doesn’t provide support for the proprietary exFAT filesystem by default.

If you are using CentOS as your operating system, chances are that at some point you will encounter an issue when trying to mount exFAT formatted USB drive.

This tutorial explains how to enable exFAT support on CentOS 7.

Mounting exFAT Drive on CentOS #

To be able to mount exFAT filesystem on CentOS you’ll need to install the free FUSE exFAT module and tools which provide a full-featured exFAT file system implementation for Unix-like systems.

exFAT packages are not available in CentOS 7 core repositories. You can choose to build the exFAT tools from source or to install it with yum from the Nux Dextop repository. We’ll go with the second option.

The Nux repository depends on the EPEL software repository. If the EPEL repository is not enabled on your system, enable it by typing:

sudo yum install epel-release

Next, import the repository GPG key and enable the Nux repository by installing the rpm package :

sudo rpm -v --import http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/RPM-GPG-KEY-nux.rosudo rpm -Uvh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-5.el7.nux.noarch.rpm

Once the repository is enabled install the exfat-fuse and exfat-utils packages using the following commands:

sudo yum install exfat-utils fuse-exfat

That’s it! You can now mount your exFAT formatted device.

Conclusion #

We have shown you how to enable support for the exFAT file system on your CentOS 7 machine. Some people refer to exFAT as FAT64.

The USB drive will auto mount when you insert it, but in case the auto-mount fails you will have to mount the drive manually .

If you hit a problem or have feedback, leave a comment below.