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Nagabhushan S N
Asked: 2021-04-08 04:11:24 +0800 CST

Convert exFat HDD to ext4

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I have an external hard disk which was formatted as ext4. I recently connected this HDD to a new system and all of a sudden, the format changed to exFat. I have no idea how this happened. Is it possible to convert exFat back to ext4?

I have a lot of symlinks in the HDD. But exFat doesn't support symlinks. This is causing a huge problem for me. Is there any way out?

The outputs of various commands are below

$ df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2      fuseblk   3.7T  2.8T  905G  76% /media/smart/BackupPlus

$ fsck -N /dev/sdb2
fsck from util-linux 2.34
[/sbin/fsck.ext2 (1) -- /dev/sdb2] fsck.ext2 /dev/sdb2

$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE   LABEL      UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sdb                                                                                 
├─sdb1      vfat     EFI        67E3-17ED                                           
└─sdb2      exfat    BackupPlus 5FA8-BCEE                             904.5G    76% /media/smart/BackupPlus

$ mount | grep sdb2
/dev/sdb2 on /media/smart/BackupPlus type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)

$ blkid /dev/sdb2
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="BackupPlus" UUID="5FA8-BCEE" TYPE="exfat" PARTUUID="ff2c7cdb-a161-4ee2-8c52-2eba4c63b23b"

$ sudo file -sL /dev/sdb2
/dev/sdb2: DOS/MBR boot sector

$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during installation
UUID=8bb8cb68-d702-47e1-9ed1-791f8746830f /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during installation
UUID=E5DA-F3CE  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0
partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The reason I thought the HDD was not exfat earlier was because I had created symlinks in it and I read on web that exfat does not support symlinks. However, I noticed that the same HDD when connected to Ubuntu 18.04 system recognizes all symlinks in exfat format itself. But in Ubuntu 20.04, it doesn't. I don't know why it happens.

    So, the conclusion is that it was probably exfat since the beginning and it didn't convert from ext4 to exfat "magically".

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