Hello, Have tried to locate this problem all over the internet and on the MS forums. But the only thing I find is that 'it can't be done'. I find this hard to believe since MS created ExFat.
May 3, 2018 - Whether you want to format a flash drive on your Mac or convert a USB hard drive to use as a media player, Disk. Open a new Finder window and click on the drive. Unlike FAT32, exFAT doesn't have a maximum file limit.
I do have MACDRIVE installed on my system and have been able to read any MAC drives handed to me. Until the introduction of ExFAT. When my clients give me MAC drives formatted with ExFat, my Windows 8.1 Pro system tells me that the 'Drive needs to be formatted'. If I inspect the volume with DISK MANAGEMENT it tells me that the file system is RAW.
Any lookups on RAW online say 'drive is corrupted'. But this is not the case. I took the drive to someone with a MAC and they read it perfectly. When I asked what format the drive was in. I understand that the problem is MAC is formatting ExFat with some kind of proprietary BOOT STRAP which makes the Win system unable to read it.
But has nothing been done with this? No driver update? For either side?
Am I going to have to purchase a MAC system JUST to read ExFat. Which is ironic since it was created for compatibility. Any help with this will be greatly appreciated!
Hi Steven, According to my research, Windows can’t read exFAT drive formatted by MAC, but MAC could read and write drive formatted by Windows. If it is possible, try to contact with the client and send the file again without format drive with ExFat.
Or you could search for some third party software on google to open it. Best regards, Joy. Funny, but I have just the opposite external enclosure Raid 0 (2x 3TB) so 6TB formatted as exFAT in Windows 10 (with creators update) MacOS Sierra, Can't read or mount the exFAT. So I redo the Raid 0 under Mac and format it as exFAT in MacOS. And now this exFAT works on both Mac and Windows 10 very strange. DC Edit: I just figure out why in my case.
When formatting exFAT in Windows 10 from Disk management If formats the exFAT using Allocation unit size of 2048 kilobytes if you right click on the drive and reformat the exFAT using allocation 1024 kilobytes then it will work in MacOS DC.