Raspbian is useless! Cant use exFat or NTFS

[eliminatrix]

Hi All,

Bit of a rant for a new user and someone new to Raspberry Pi's. I installed it on a 16GB microSD card. My hope was to connect some external storage devices and see how it goes playing MKVs.

Plugged in a couple of USB sticks and one USB hard drive dock.
ExFat = Not Recognised
NTFS = Not Recognised.

Straight off the bat. For a new user, all I can say is this - Raspbian is a bit lot of NOTHING. Pretty damn useless if it can't even recognise or load STANDARD and COMMON file systems straight off.

What do I have to do to get it to access these file systems?

[Martin Frezman]

Straight off the bat. For a new user, all I can say is this - Raspbian is a bit lot of NOTHING. Pretty damn useless if it can't even recognise or load STANDARD and COMMON file systems straight off.

Any minute now, the regs will start peppering you with responses saying that neither of there are "standard" or "common" and that none of their systems use either one of these, and that they are just Microsoft things. And that you should use ext4 (or, ext* in general) just like they do.

That all said, the fact is that support for either or both of these is just an "apt-get" away. I believe you want:

apt-get install ntfs-3g

and

apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

Both of which work fine. Incidentally, I think that read-only support for ntfs is already there; it should be in the default install. And note that the read-only ntfs driver, although now somewhat deprecated, is actually safer than the read-write driver. If all you need is to be able to read your NTFS formatted drives, this may be the better option.

[eliminatrix]

Thanks Martin! I'll give it a shot later today

Is there any chance you're just as handy with Ubuntu Mate? I could *really* use some help with that if you're willing?

[rpdom]

neither of there are "standard" or "common"

You said it, not me

As it happens, I have never used exFAT (I don't believe it is that common except for SDXC cards), and use NTFS rarely. There is NTFS support in Raspbian as standard, but it is read-only.

You've already pointed out (as the "regs" as you label them would say) that there is support, all you need to do is load the right drivers.

Having said that, there are a few Operating systems out there that don't support the extremely common ext2/3/4 file system format without additional software.

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi All,

Bit of a rant for a new user and someone new to Raspberry Pi's. I installed it on a 16GB microSD card. My hope was to connect some external storage devices and see how it goes playing MKVs.

Plugged in a couple of USB sticks and one USB hard drive dock.
ExFat = Not Recognised
NTFS = Not Recognised.

Straight off the bat. For a new user, all I can say is this - Raspbian is a bit lot of NOTHING. Pretty damn useless if it can't even recognise or load STANDARD and COMMON file systems straight off.

What do I have to do to get it to access these file systems?

Only common formats if you accept that Windows NT family is the only Operating System on this planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems


exFAT is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

NTFS is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

Therefore it is unfair to blame anybody but Microsoft for this situation

[Martin Frezman]

One man's meat is another man's poison.

To the OP: Since Ubuntu and Raspbian are both basically Debian, the same commands should work in Ubuntu.

[fruitoftheloom]

Thanks Martin! I'll give it a shot later today

Is there any chance you're just as handy with Ubuntu Mate? I could *really* use some help with that if you're willing?

Ubuntu-Mate is a community developed respin for the RPi 2B & 3B and details here:

https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

[jamesh]

Straight off the bat. For a new user, all I can say is this - Raspbian is a bit lot of NOTHING. Pretty damn useless if it can't even recognise or load STANDARD and COMMON file systems straight off.

Any minute now, the regs will start peppering you with responses saying that neither of there are "standard" or "common" and that none of their systems use either one of these, and that they are just Microsoft things. And that you should use ext4 (or, ext* in general) just like they do.

That all said, the fact is that support for either or both of these is just an "apt-get" away. I believe you want:

apt-get install ntfs-3g

and

apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

Both of which work fine. Incidentally, I think that read-only support for ntfs is already there; it should be in the default install. And note that the read-only ntfs driver, although now somewhat deprecated, is actually safer than the read-write driver. If all you need is to be able to read your NTFS formatted drives, this may be the better option.

I seriously think you need to reconsider the way you are approaching your posts on here. They are unnecessarily critical, and appear to be deliberately targeted to annoy the mods.

Poster question has been answered, so I think we'll lock this.