Trouble reading BSD formatted HD in USB hard drive... but it works fine in Linux!

[Donald Burr of Borg]

I recently decided to move one of the drives in my main system into an
external USB 2.0 case.  This was done so that I could take this drive
between several systems (it is primarily used for backup and data
archival).

Yes, I know that 1394 (FireWire) would be faster, but not all of my
machines are capable of it.  And some of them literally do *not* have any
free PCI slots which I could insert a 1394 card into.

Like I said, the drive I installed in my USB case was already formatted as
a FreeBSD drive.  However, once I inserted it into a USB case, I am now
unable to mount the drive again.  Here are the appropriate dmesg
printouts:

umass0: Acer Labs USB 2.0 Storage Device, rev 2.00/1.03, addr 2
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <USB 2.0 Storage Device 0100> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 650KB/s transfers
da0: 76319MB (156301488 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 10783C)
da0: reading primary partition table: error reading fsbn 0
da0: reading primary partition table: error reading fsbn 0

(The "reading primary partition table" errors appear when I try the
following mount command:  mount -t ufs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/backup)

Now, here's the kicker: I took the same drive over to a friend's Linux box
(he is running Mandrake 9.1, with Linux kernel 2.4.21-0.13mdk).  Linux
has had the ability, for some time now, to mount UFS partitions.  So I
figured "what the heck" and decided that I'd try mounting it on his
system.  Here is the dmesg printouts from when I plugged in the USB hard
drive to this Linux box:

hub.c: new USB device 00:11.3-1, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x402/0x5621) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: USB 2.0   Model: Storage Device    Rev: 0100
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 156301488 512-byte hdwr sectors (80026 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
 p1: <bsd: >

Aha!  It seems that it is able to detect this disk just fine, and it does
see a BSD filesystem on it.  And sure enough, issuing the command "mount
-t ufs -o ro,ufstype=44bsd /dev/sda1 /mnt/bsd" works fine!!  I am able to
read any and all files on this drive.

I'd really like to get this sucker going under FreeBSD, but I am frankly
out of ideas and at my wit's end.  I am grateful to anyone who can offer
any assistance or hints/clues at this point.

The kernel configuration from my FreeBSD machine is available if anyone
would like to see it.  In short, I enabled all USB options in the kernel
config file, as well as the SCSI base code.

The USB case in question is a generic case labeled only "ME-320 Series
3.5"/5.25" External Enclosure."  It is available in several
configurations; mine is the single-port USB 1.1/2.0 configuration.  It
apparently uses an Acer Labs USB-to-IDE bridge chip, tho I can't tell what
the chip's part number is.

Thanks!!
-- 
Donald Burr of Borg <dburr at borg-cube.com> | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
Website: http://www.borg-cube.com/        | http://www.freebsd.org/
PO Box 91212, Santa Barbara CA 93190-1212 \-----------------------------
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