I copied a few files and folders with unicode characters from my FAT32 drive to the exFAT drive... now I see the files and folders but cannot delete or examine them (file not found).

So exFAT does not support unicode (čšž...) in file names?

I tried to see the short name with dir /x but on Win7 this switch seems to have no effect...

Please help! I think I'll probably be able to live without unicode in file names but I'd really like to delete those files now...

thank you! david

davidhq

Posted 2013-06-13T15:43:19.133

Reputation: 255

Answers

exFAT:

Supported:

UTF-16 Character Support

Unsupported:

U+0000 (NUL) through U+001F (US)
/ (Slash)
\ (Backslash)
: (Colon)
* (Asterisk)
? (Question Mark)
" (Double Quote)
< (Less Than)
> (Greater Than)
| (Pipe)

You can use iconv from GNUWin32, it works the same as the GNU/Linux counterpart:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 filename.txt

you can then use it with batch, provided you've added it to your %PATH%:

for /f %x in ('dir /b *.txt') do iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 %x

Trenton Bost

Posted 2013-06-13T15:43:19.133

Reputation: 123

Man, this filesystem is the worst. – J3RN – 2017-09-07T00:19:46.593

hmm so you're saying that it should support unicode? why do I have problems then? iconv is for converting unsupported chars to supported? also don't understand.. sorry and thanx! – davidhq – 2013-06-13T16:51:40.030

I tried to copy another file, this time with "ü" character and this worked?! ččcžž.txt did not work... so those characters cause problems and I cannot delete the file... and I want those letters in files I just decided (I cannot live without that).. so I want it to work completely... can someone try to copy the file named "ččcžž.txt" to an exFAT external HDD please? thank you – davidhq – 2013-06-13T19:20:54.487

I formatted the drive again from Windows and there was the same problem... and I also read that exFAT is not journaled... so it looks like it's not that good and it seems unreliable.. I will use NTFS and install Paragon NTFS driver on my Mac to be able to write from it.

davidhq

Posted 2013-06-13T15:43:19.133

Reputation: 255

cannot delete files from exFAT drive

Answers

exFAT: