Ubuntu – exFAT external drive not recognized on Windows

exfat

I have an external USB drive connected to my Ubuntu 12.04.5 server, which has been formatted with exFAT filesystem (after I installed the required packages like fuse-exfat and exfat-util). My drive works perfectly without any issue.

But when I try to connect this drive to a Windows 10 host, it is not recognized properly by the system (Windows is not able to detect the filesystem). I have read somewhere that the same happens if the drive has been formatted from a Mac, and the "only" solution was to always format a drive from Windows, if you want to use it on other operating systems.

Am I the only one experimenting this? Is it because I made sure to create an "aligned" partition when I formatted it (no remember exactly what it was, but I did to get rid of a warning in Ubuntu when I mount it).

Update (2015-12-07)

The version of exfat-utils and exfat-fuse: 1.0.1-1~ubuntu12.04.1.

And the warning I got wasn't on mount after all, but at the creation of the partition using parted with mkpart:

Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.

So I followed this guide to create an aligned partition: http://rainbow.chard.org/2013/01/30/how-to-align-partitions-for-best-performance-using-parted/

Best Answer

After some trial and errors, I've been able to format an exFAT partition on Ubuntu that is working on Windows 10. The trick is to add the msftdata flag on the partition (regardless if partition is aligned or not):

 sudo parted <DEVICE> set <PARTITION_NUMBER> msftdata on

For example:

 sudo parted /dev/sde set 1 msftdata on

And it worked for me in Windows 10!

And in case it helps someone, this is how I created a single aligned exFAT partition in the first place:

 sudo parted /dev/sde mklabel gpt
 sudo parted -a optimal /dev/sde mkpart primary '0%' '100%'
 sudo mkfs.exfat /dev/sde1