mounting linux partitions

Isaac Mushinsky itz at mushinsky.net
Fri May 9 18:05:26 UTC 2008


I have installed a linux distro on a partition of my machine (latest
Mandriva i686, default installation). I only need it to use a piece of
software for Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner (yes, sane works, but a cheap
commercial package called vuescan has better interface and uses some
hardware features like infrared channel that sane does not support, at least
in current stable version).

Now I would like to mount ext3 partition from FreeBSD at least for reading,
or vice versa, UFS2 from linux for writing. With kernel option EXT2FS, I can


$ mount -t etx2fs /dev/ad12s7 /linux

but then if I do

$ ls /linux

I get a 'Bad file descriptor' for directory /linux. e2fsprogs are installed,
and fsck.ext2 or fsck.ext3 think well of the partition. Also, df seems to
show it correctly, with size and free space.

I have FreeBSD 7.0 for amd64, Linux is 32-bit version. Also the partition is
'extended', i.e. fdisk on FreeBSD shows a DOS partition, but linux's fdisk
shows a couple of ext3 partitions. However, /dev/ad12s7 does correspond to
the correct linux partition and, when mounted, df shows the right size and
utilization.

Any advice how to share a partition between these 2 systems? I only want to
use linux to scan the film and store the pictures on disk, then boot into
FreeBSD where I spend most of my life as a user. I feel more comfortable
pulling from FreeBSD rather than pushing to it because (1) it is easier for
me to recompile FreeBSD kernel or install packages if necessary, and (2) I
would mind much less a corruption on the linux partition than on UFS; I can
simply reinstall the default installation for Linux, but FreeBSD has
important data and is finely tuned for me over the years.


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