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I have some files on my SSD and I want to put them on my Ubuntu 12.04(64bit) desktop , but Ubuntu cannot open the exFAT SSD when I connect it via USB. How can I make it work?

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exFAT is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft, and implementing it requires accepting a very restrictive license from Microsoft. However, there is a FUSE implementation of exFAT for linux.

Since you are on a Ubuntu system, you can install the above-mentioned exFAT implementation from their PPA.

  1. Add the PPA to your sources list by running

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat

    in your favourite terminal emulator

  2. Install the fuse-exfat and the exfat-utils packages:

    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

Now you should be able to use the SSD

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  • This worked quite well for me. Didn't even have to reboot. Though for some reason it wouldn't install directly, so I just did a sudo apt-get -d download fuse-exfat followed by sudo dpkg -i path/to/file.deb ftw.
    – MarkHu
    Jan 10, 2013 at 21:02
  • Worked like a charm with my 12.04 using these commands but within a sudo shell (sudo -s) instead of "sudo .." for each commands.
    – Jay
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:58
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    Worked for me in 12.04 as described. No need to "sudo -s".
    – mivk
    Jun 28, 2013 at 10:35
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    Same for me, no need for sudo -s
    – loostro
    Feb 3, 2014 at 9:08
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    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat does not work at all
    – Nicolas S.Xu
    Nov 23, 2018 at 16:44
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To install exfat on Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, you don’t need to add any extra PPA to your sources list. You only need to install the exfat-utils package.

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install exfat-utils

Ubuntu and Linux Mint will not automatically mount exFAT devices.  To mount your exFAT device, plug in your device and run:

$ su -
# cat /proc/partitions
# cd /media
# mkdir usbdrive
# mount -t exfat /dev/sdd1 usbdrive

From How to enable exFAT on Ubuntu (on Nam Huy Linux), with a typo corrected.

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This method works for mounting SSD or SD Card: If you need to add the PPA to your sources then type following command in terminal,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat

Next you need to install the exfat-utils through following command,

sudo apt-get install exfat-utils

This will install both

exfat-utils and exfat-fuse.

Then try to mount the SD Card or SSD. Hope this will work.

Note: while executing the second command for installing the exfat-utils, you may encounter the following issue:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable) E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

This is because that only one program can hold the lock. Make sure that you are not running aptitude, synaptic or adept etc. To work around this issue, you just need to restart the machine and then opening the terminal and install the exfat-utils before doing or opening anything else in the machine. Hope this will work for solving both the mounting SSD/SDCard issue and the lock issue.

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