Files not appearing on exfat external hard drive

[windyj]

Hi,
I'm an old linux guy that went to Mac almost a year ago now. The transition has been mostly painless, although now I'm stumped by my current problem

I have a Toshiba 1 TB external HD that is formatted exfat. There are about 30 directories/folders down from the mount point. Five of the directories, each with multiple files in it don't show up in Finder. All the rest are fine and behave as they should.

The directories in question aren't hidden. Their permissions all are the same as all the rest on the drive. In disk Utility it verifies as fine with no problems at all.

Now the weird part. When I look at the drive in Terminal everything looks normal when I use the "ls" command. The missing directories are shown. When I "ls -l" they are not. Other variants of "ls -lah, ls -a" etc., do not show the missing directories. Everything else looks fine. When I cd to the suspect directory I get a directory not found message. When I use the open command to the suspect directory I get the same error message. What is interesting is if I "ls -i" the drive it tells me the name of the missing directory and then tells me it's not found.

When I plug the drive into my linux box everything is there and everything is fine. The five directories are there with the other 25 and I can open and close files in them no problem. In linux all permissions/ownerships of the files and folders are the same.

I'm kind of stumped here. Any suggestions??

 

[Shirasaki]

Although I am sure I cannot give you much help, could you post those folder and files name pattern?
For example, pattern file name for hidden file is ".filename"
And could you notice if file name contains special characters?

 

[windyj]

Although I am sure I cannot give you much help, could you post those folder and files name pattern?
For example, pattern file name for hidden file is ".filename"
And could you notice if file name contains special characters?

Filenames are pretty simple. Nothing fancy. No hidden files starting with "."

Directory: DEXTER path /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER
Sub under that: /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER/Season1
Files : /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER/Season1/Dexter_s01e01.mp4 ....

and following. Is this what you were asking? The others are similar. One directory in a different missing folder has a period "." in the directory name. That is all there is other than alpha-numeric.

Thanks

 

[Shirasaki]

Filenames are pretty simple. Nothing fancy. No hidden files starting with "."

Directory: DEXTER path /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER
Sub under that: /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER/Season1
Files : /Volumes/KimP/New/DEXTER/Season1/Dexter_s01e01.mp4 ....

and following. Is this what you were asking? The others are similar. One directory in a different missing folder has a period "." in the directory name. That is all there is other than alpha-numeric.

Thanks

Uh. Yes. Nothing fancy. Should not be the cause of problem.
Exfat compatibility is really poor, even under Windows.
Or, Mac OS X cannot handle exfat that well.
If you have access of a Windows PC, you can try to browse those files on Windows and see if there is anything abnormal.

 

[windyj]

Uh. Yes. Nothing fancy. Should not be the cause of problem.
Exfat compatibility is really poor, even under Windows.
Or, Mac OS X cannot handle exfat that well.
If you have access of a Windows PC, you can try to browse those files on Windows and see if there is anything abnormal.

I can browse the files in Parallels running Windows 8.1 no problem. I can also browse them just fine on my Linux computer which is a different computer altogether.

Last night, in Windows via Parallels, I copied one of the missing directories back to my Mac HD. I then unmounted the drive in Windows, remounted in Mac and copied the complete directory, about 5GB, back to the same parent directory using the same name....DEXTER-new. It is fine and fully readable on the Mac now. If I look at the drive in Mac I see DEXTER-new, if I look at it in Linux or Windows I see DEXTER, then below it DEXTER-new.

So I have an easy enough solution to fix it, but still have no idea how or why this happened and makes me think exfat is just unreliable on the Mac. Seems fine on my Windows running in Parallels or my Linux box a totally separate computer. I miss my ext4 filesystem on Linux, bulletproof, journaled and never a problem....