External Drive showing errors in NixOS but not Fedora

Help
1

Hi

I’ve got an external drive (formatted to exfat) that I was struggling to get mounted as read/write (whatever I did, I had to use sudo to write). I swapped from running mount to using fileSystems in configuration.nix, didn’t work so I removed that bit of configuration. Now I can’t mount it at all and when I plug the drive in I get,

scsi 1:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
scsi 1:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19

dumped straight to the terminal.

The particularly confusing thing is that, if I plug it into a system running Fedora 43 it’s all happy. Mounts in read/write no problem and gnome disks can’t find any errors.

If you can help with the read/write thing that would be very appreciated but honestly, getting it back to how it was would be plenty at this point.

Nix version 25.11 - minimal modifications from what you get straight out of the installer. (ssh, docker and a handful of packages added)

2

I’m not a kernel expert, but, since no-one else is chiming in - I bet your two distros have different kernels and/or kernel modules (disk drivers are often kernel modules). So you could try experimenting with different FAT kernel modules in NixOS. (Unless it’s an expensive drive I would assume that it’s no longer reliable and I’d copy everything off it, but that’s advice you didn’t ask for!)

3

Thanks for the reply Mapybara. I tried choosing the kernel version to match the fedora one but that didn’t help, specific kernel modules are a bit beyond me.

I enabled gnome on my NixOS system to do some more debugging because I like the gnome disk app and it works now. Read/Write and all.

Not a clue why, but it works so I’m not going to touch it

1 Like