How to mount Windows USB drive onto Centos/RHEL 7 + How to fix error mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'

Following are the simple instructions on how to mount Windows USB drive onto Centos/RHEL 7 and also resolve a very common mounting issue which presents itself with error: mount: unknown...

Following are the simple instructions on how to mount Windows USB drive onto Centos/RHEL 7 and also resolve a very common mounting issue which presents itself with error: **mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'. **

Before we can mount the USB drive, we need to first obtain its file system path. Run following command to do so:

fdisk -l

In the output, you need to look for your USB drive, I've found mine by SSD the disk size (120 GB) and SDB denominator.

2015-11-29_18-50-18

Another, perhaps easier way to do this, is to run following command:

for devlink in /dev/disk/by-id/usb*; do readlink -f ${devlink}; done

It'll output something like this:

2015-11-29_19-03-25

Anyhow, as you can see, my USB drive is listed as: /dev/sdb1, and this is all I needed to know in order to mount it onto my CentOS system.

Now, let's create a directory to which we will attach our USB drive:

mkdir /mnt/usb

And finally let's mount the file system to /mnt/usb directory we've just created.

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

Now your USB drive will be accessible by browsing to: /mnt/usb:

Note: it'll automatically un-mount if you reboot your system.

If you want to un-mount manually, simple use:

umount /mnt/usb

If the drive is busy and above command won't let you un-mount, you can forcefully unmount it by using this command:

umount -f /mnt/usb

--

Now, as far as dealing with error: **mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'. **

You'll most likely experience this error because you're trying to mount a drive previously formatted under Windows OS.

To resolve the issue, you'll need to install support for mounting EXFAT drives onto Linux. Do that by installing following two programs: exfat-utils and fuse-exfat

Normally, these are not present in Centos 7, so before you will run Yum Install command, you'll first need to add li.nux.ro Epel repository to your system:

yum -y install epel-release && rpm -Uvh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-5.el7.nux.noarch.rpm

Finally, you can install exfat support with this simple command:

yum install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

And once this is done, you can run above mounting procedure again - it'll work without any errors.

Enjoy!