Can't write to network-shared exfat drive

Tech Support
1

I have a 1TB drive, formatted as exfat, connected to a mini-pc running Ubuntu. It’s plugged directly into an ethernet port on the router. Using it as a Plex media server. I am trying to copy files over to this drive from my MacBook Air M1 running Sequoia 15.5.

When I drag and drop I just get the ‘nope’ circle. Copy/paste does not work, even though Finder shows I’m connected as my username. I can browse all files/folders on Finder from this shared drive.

I have done several modifications to fstab and smb.conf but nothing changes.

Any ideas how I can fix this evidently permissions issue?

2

Last week I had a problem with when I attached an exFAT drive to my MBA. Later I did a search using: macos sequoia “exfat”

And found a number of people with similar problems. It looks like macOS 15 has a problem with exFAT drives.

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3

Finally got it working. I’m still not sure which thing I fiddled with that did the trick. Here are some relevant files in case this helps someone in the future:

/etc/fstab
UUID=67DC-DFB6 /mnt/mediafiles exfat defaults,user,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0000,auto,rw,nofail 0 0

The relevant portion of /etc/samba/smb.conf

[SharedDrive]
path = /mnt/mediafiles
browseable = yes
writable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
4

macOS is not able to see the underlying file system of a network drive, the server is handling the reading and/or writing of files. The file system of the SMB-server can be for Linux various file system types, such as fat, ext4, XFS, Btrfs, and ZFS.

So this has nothing to do with a directly attached drive to your Mac. In this case it was a configuration problem on the server side.

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