exFAT support on macOS seems to have some bugs because my external drives with exFAT formatting will randomly get corrupted.
Disk Utility is unable to repair this at first, but the fix is this:
- Use
diskutil list
to find the right drive id. - You want the id under the IDENTIFIER column, it should look like
disk1s1
- Run
sudo fsck_exfat -d <id from above>
. egsudo fsck_exfat -d disk1s3
-d
is debug so you'll see all your files output as they're processed.- Answer
YES
if it gives you the promptMain boot region needs to be updated. Yes/No?
- Open Disk Utility and you should be able to repair here successfully.
See the apple man page below for details on the fsck_exfat
utility.
Sources/Extra Reading: https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/fsck_exfat.8.html https://craigsmith.id.au/2014/07/06/repairing-a-corrupted-mac-osx-exfat-partition/ https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4154638?tstart=0
I have been dealing with this error for almost 6 years now. My drives are big 6TB - 8TB I cannot use FAT32 for that reason I have to use exFat to make my drives compatible with both windows and Mac. The drives always mount on my windows machine but on Mac it randomly mounts. Apple needs to fix this. When I urgently have a need to access my data sometimes I cannot mount it on Mac so I have to use windows as a middle man or use virtual machine like parallels. It's interesting the Mac cannot mount but VM running on it can mount it. Anyways thanks for your help. It sucks that I always have to come here to check solutions because I forget the command prompts.