It's kind of weird that Apple wouldn't put up a progress bar or anything friendly like that.
The good news was that, somehow, the system was already running the fsck_exfat program behind the scenes! Using ps revealed it. Using fsck_exfat from the command line resulted in the error message Resource busy. The drive was perfectly visible, but nothing would mount it. Although the drive was fine, it wouldn't mount. Should have done it MacOS Extended (Journaled).Īlthough I unmounted it cleanly, it still came back dirty. I made the mistake of formatting a large external hard drive ExFAT.
