18.04

Recently we tried to mount a Micro SD card that was formatted using the exFat format. To do so we used the build in card reader of a laptop that was running Ubuntu 18.04. To our disappointment, the OS was able to “see” the device as ‘/dev/mmcblk0’ but it could not automatically mount it.

First step we did was of course to update the system using:

sudo apt update;

and then we made sure we had all the necessary packages installed:

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils;

Unfortunately, we still could not automatically mount the device. So we decided to try and mount it manually which also failed:

sudo mount -t exfat /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/vmfs;
 FUSE exfat 1.2.8
 ERROR: failed to read boot sector.

As we were not sure what was wrong we decided to do an experiment which turned out to be our solution: to use an external card reader and try again.. guess what? It worked!!

We will investigate further the issue with the build in card reader but for now we are able to work around the issue with the external card reader.