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I am trying to format my external hard drive which contained some important data and was earlier formatted as exFAT. The external hard drive (Transcend 1TB) was bought 6 months prior and it does not get mounted on Ubuntu. But the drive is visible in disks utility. Following is the image:

Disk

I tried this link for solution as the question contained the same error as I am getting while formatting the hard disk.

As per the link stated I installed gparted after opening it gives me error Input/Output error during read on /dev/sdb.

I ignored the error and after I select my device from drop down of gparted following image is the outcome. enter image description here

Can I retrieve my data and device? If I can not retrieve my data can I format the disk for reuse?

Or is the disk completely damaged?

Furqan Hashim
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  • Have you installed the utilities that enable Linux to read and write to exFAT? They are exfat-fuse and exfat-utils. However if you are running Ubuntu 20.04 you shouldn’t need them. Also it’s not clear in your question if you need to recover data from the disk or just format it. Either way the utilities mentioned above should enable you to do both. – PonJar May 08 '20 at 12:42
  • @PonJar packages you mentioned are already installed and I was using this hdd on same pc earlier. My first priority would be to get data from the disk. – Furqan Hashim May 08 '20 at 16:03
  • Your question is a bit confusing because if you format the disk you will not be able to recover any data without using specialist tools. I’ve seen other questions this week with a similar problem. What kernel are you running? uname -a in terminal will tell you. Also let us know what version of Ubuntu are you running. – PonJar May 08 '20 at 20:36
  • @PonJar assuming I don't want to get my data. How can I format my disk. Result from `uname -a` `Linux HP-Z600-Workstation 4.4.0-178-generic #208-Ubuntu SMP` Using Ubuntu 16.04 – Furqan Hashim May 08 '20 at 21:27
  • I solved the similar problem: https://askubuntu.com/a/1478086/849328 – luisito_36 Jul 16 '23 at 02:54

2 Answers2

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Ok here is the result of a bit of research which may answer your question.

Generally exFAT is not seen as a reliable file system. Some people recommend NTFS if you want to share data between Linux and Windows machines

Gparted does not have fully support exFAT. It needs the util-linux package version 2.18 or above for exfat detection. Without that I doubt GParted will be able to do anything to your exFAT disk.

apt search util-linux

will tell you if you have it installed

There does seem to be an alternative driver techrepublic article

If you install this you may get the whole thing working although it should work with the packages mentioned in the comments above

If you are giving up on data recovery and just want to wipe the disk then fdisk should do the job. How to use it is another question

PonJar
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I had the same problem with SD Card 1TB, but I just solved thankfully. I DON'T recoomend to use Disks app, nor Gparted app, it's a big problem.

The steps are following to install exfat-fuse and cryptsetup:

sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse
sudo apt-get install cryptsetup

If the drive gets stuck to be formated because it "is in use", just type:

umount –l /dev/<drive>

There are two options of steps: With or without encryption

A.1. WITHOUT ENCRYPTION: First format the drive, you can check lsblk to find the drive:

sudo mkfs -t exfat /dev/<drive>

A.2. If it was successful and if you can access that drive in a folder, great and the final step is to format with ext4 if you want instead of exFAT:

sudo mkfs -t ext4  /dev/<drive>

B.1. WITH ENCRYPTION: There are steps to encrypt the drive, you can check lsblk to find the drive, type the following command and set a new password, and later type the next command to unlock the drive:

sudo cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/<drive>
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/<drive> luks

B.2. Check the mapping of the drive:

sudo fdisk -l

B.3. The drive is mapped to /dev/mapper/luks as shown the output of the above command (you can check ls /dev/mapper). Now use the mkfs command, I've tried to create an ext4 filesystem but later I tried to mount and I got a message "bad superblock, bad option or other error", I don't know why. So the only way is to create an exFAT filesystem that is very good.

sudo mkfs -t exfat /dev/mapper/luks

That's all, enjoy it. Good luck!

luisito_36
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