# Why can’t I use a thumb drive with my Chromebook?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-can-t-i-use-a-thumb-drive-with-my-chromebook/991480>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 12, 2023, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-can-t-i-use-a-thumb-drive-with-my-chromebook/991480 "2023-10-12T21:25:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-can-t-i-use-a-thumb-drive-with-my-chromebook/991480/1 "2023-10-12T21:25:56Z")

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I’m trying to save some documents to a thumb drive from my Acer Chromebook. The thumb drive shows up when I open the Files, but I can’t save a Word doc from the Chromebook drive to the thumb drive. Can’t do control copy and past, can’t save using the save function in Google Docs. Any thoughts?

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**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-can-t-i-use-a-thumb-drive-with-my-chromebook/991480/2 "2023-10-12T21:44:48Z")

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What filesystem is on the thumb drive? If it is Windows NTFS or Mac formatted, then the Chromebook may be able to read it, but not write to it. I’m not sure how ChromeOS handles exFAT, so that could be causing a problem, too. Modern ChromeOS should be able to deal with exFAT.

It’s also possible that there was some sort of hardware error with the drive that caused it to revert to read only mode.

I’m not sure on ChromeOS how to tell what filesystem is on an external drive without opening a command line.

If there is nothing on the drive you care about, then reformat it on your Chromebook. If you can’t write to it to reformat it, then that suggests a hardware problem.

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**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-can-t-i-use-a-thumb-drive-with-my-chromebook/991480/3 "2023-10-12T21:47:05Z")

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Thanks. Will putter around. May be simpler to use a different computer.