Ubuntu – I have a Samsung portable SSD and can’t open

kylinsamsungssd

My laptop right now runs Ubuntu Kylin, and has no Windows on it after accidentally wiping it when I updated the Ubuntu version. I'm trying to access a SSD from Samsung that used to work fine with windows.There's an .exe file to activate it.. However, right now I can't seem to get the file to open. It opens briefly and then closes. I've tried installing exfat-utils which I read somewhere solved other people's problems, but still I'm having no relief to my issue. I've tried using Wine, but I'm unfamiliar and can't get that to operate properly either.

Best Answer

Samsung's proprietary software appears to be only for encryption. You won't be able to access any encrypted files on the drive from Linux since Samsung doesn't support that.

  • If the drive is encrypted and you don't have any (valuable) data on the drive or moved it somewhere else (temporarily), you can repartition, reformat and use the SSD in Linux without additional software.

  • If the drive is not encrypted you should be able to use it in Ubuntu right away or at least after installing the exfat-fuse package. If you can't, please edit your question or open a new question and include the output of lsusb, sudo lsblk -f and a screenshot of the drive as seen by GParted.

If you want to encrypt your data on Linux (or any operating system really), it's always better to opt for vendor-independent, non-proprietary solutions. Popular examples for disk encryption system on Linux are

  • LUKS (Linux and BSD with cryptsetup, Windows with LibreCrypt (beta), OS X only through Linux guest system) and

  • TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt (Linux, BSD with cryptsetup, Windows, OS X).

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