Gparted cannot create & check exfat

Only move, copy, label, & UUID are available.
Can somebody please advise how to fix this?
I’ve found several variations of this question in this forum but they are old and unanswered.
On other distros, only “grow” & “shrink” are unavailable.
This is on a laptop with Linux 6.12.32, NixOS, 25.11 (Xantusia), 25.11pre814309 (unstable channel?) & Gparted 1.7.0

Could you elaborate a little bit more?
Are you starting it from a Nix shell? Is there some output, does it complain about something while doing so?

GParted, a popular partition editor, does not natively support the creation and checking of exFAT file systems. While it can resize and delete exFAT partitions, creating and checking them typically requires other tools. Here are some alternatives you can use: Using Disks Utility (GNOME Disks)

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I think there is a problem with exfat support on this nixos system although I have the exfat and exfatprogs packages installed.



I tried removing the packages (because I read somewhere that recent kernels natively support exfat) but this made zero difference :laughing:

Sorry, I don’t follow. On the other distros I’ve checked, I’m able to create exfat volumes in gparted. I also checked and gnome disks does support creating exfat volumes.

Remove exfat and exfatprogs from your packages. Instead use boot.supportedFilesystems.exfat = true; which will automatically handle making the correct package available:

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Yeah, that’s pretty obviously copied from an LLM with zero fact checking.

Unlike other distros, NixOS deliberately does not necessarily “install” packages in a globally discoverable location like other distros do. This is to prevent installing multiple different versions of the same package causing your system to break (because some package that may depend on a library unexpectedly requires a version incompatible with the one required by another package).

As a result, just installing the exfatprogs package (by putting it in environment.systemPackages doesn’t necessarily mean gparted will pick it up.

This is how gparted identifies whether your system supports exfat: gparted/src/exfat.cc at 61acc5b71811b4f736adf263ef66b97b50b6c132 · GNOME/gparted · GitHub

It should be compatible with most things you do on NixOS, but glib might be a bit pedantic. How did you install exfatprogs?

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Thanks, adding

boot.supportedFilesystems = [ “exfat” ];

did the trick. Strangely, I had to REMOVE

boot.supportedFilesystems = [ “ntfs” ];

from configuration.nix and add the packages ntfs3g and ntfsprogs for gparted to treat ntfs properly…
What is the correct syntax for having multiple boot.supportedFilesystems = entries?
The system still isn’t treating ntfs as expected.

i have them thusly:

  boot.supportedFilesystems = { # attr set of boolean OR list of string
    # btrfs = true; # current FS? -- 'pkgs.btrfs-progs'?
    exfat = true; # 'pkgs.exfatprogs'?
    ntfs = true; # 'pkgs.ntfs3g'?
    zfs = mkForce false; # no, thanks :)
    # ...
  };

no idea what pkgs.ntfsprogs is, that doesnt exist in nixpkgs :crazy_face:

You must be on an end-of-life version of NixOS, that wouldn’t work on 25.05 or unstable.

Thanks @waffle8946 & @frozen.frog23 , I’m all green checkmarks now.
(version specified in first post)