File Sharing exFAT-formatted drive -- not showing up (despite accounts)

Hi everyone,

I've run into an issue that I'm not quite sure how to resolve.

I am quite pleased about Win7 and Snow Leopard both having native exFAT support. I teach at a college where there is both Mac and PC labs, and I have 2 macs and a pac at home.

In my guest bedroom's closet, I have a mac-mini that's on server duty; I have a Drobo & 2 external hard drives shared via a 2-slot (thermaltake) dock (using USB). One drive in the dock is formatted HFS+, and shares out fine. I have since added the second, and formatted it as exFAT (which I'm hoping to eventually do with them all).

Regardless of how I seem to setup file sharing, and regardless of it having all the needed accounts on the shared list for the drive in preferences (it's even set to 'everyone'), the drive will not show up in the finder on my macbook pro. What I am trying to determine -- and maybe someone out there can confirm or not...since exFAT doesn't support permissions (I don't think), is this why it won't show up? I would think this wouldn't be the issue...but I can't figure it out otherwise.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

John

MBP i7 2.2 4gb, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Apr 8, 2011 8:24 AM

Reply
2 replies

Jul 5, 2011 2:55 PM in response to mook33

Hello Mr Mook33,


As of 10.6.8, the AFP component does not work with a drive that is formatted with exFAT. exFAT support in OSX is still pretty new (OSX 10.6.5+) so there maybe a few bugs. Luckily for us, the Samba (SMB) library does not mind exFat volumes and can share them just fine.



Windows 7 cannot access AFP shares, hence why apple also share files with the Windows friendly SMB protocol. This is why the exFAT drive share appears under Windows and not on OSX. OSX can display and mount SMB shares, however if given the choice, it will prefer to use the OSX native AFP protocol.



Easy fix: Make OSX use SMB, rather than AFP.

  • Click: "Finder" - "GO" - "Connect to server"
  • Type: smb://<sharecomputername>.local (example: smb://macmini.local or smb://192.168.0.10)
  • Enter in your credentials.
  • Choose the share to mount.


Note:

You can drag the titlebar icon of the finder window into the 'Devices' list (left pane) to make it easier to reach.

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File Sharing exFAT-formatted drive -- not showing up (despite accounts)

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