Mount NTFS from base system?

[Thomas Mueller]

> from Ian Smith:

>  > There actually is /sbin/mount_ntfs in NetBSD, at least newer
>  > versions, good for reading, not so good for writing, and I thought
>  > there was something in FreeBSD like that.

>  > I looked in the kernel configs, including GENERIC and NOTES, found no
 > NTFS.

> I guess you're running 10.x then.  I see it was gone by 10.0-R.

> It's still in 9.3 and so is the (very similar, by the same author) HPFS
> code, though you have to compile that yourself if needed, which was the
> case even back at 3.3-R as I recall.  I managed to recover years of work
> from several OS/2 disks with it then; perfectly reliable as read-only.

> If just for recovery, you could boot a 9.3 memstick.  Otherwise, FUSE.

> cheers, Ian

I have a USB-stick installation of FreeBSD 9.2-STABLE from when I had this FreeBSD version installed on Western Digital Green hard drive that went bad.

I had Rod Smith's gdisk on it, and subversion, see rsync was not there.

I also have FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE i386 on another USB 2.0 stick, updating that was deterred by the fact that "make installworld" took 7 to 8 hours.

So I could try booting those to see if I can mount NTFS read-only.

Just tried, from FreeBSD 9.2-STABLE amd64 USB stick, trying to mount_ntfs immediately crashed the system, I got db> prompt.

I also tried an older NetBSD-current (6.99.44 i386) where all I had installed was modular (pkgsrc) Xorg that never would start, and I got invalid argument, but no crash.

I figured if I crashed this NetBSD installation and really trashed it, nothing would be lost.

Using FreeBSD-current amd64, I installed fusefs-ntfs but still was not able to mount, though I could run ntfsls.

Strangely, ntfscp seems designed to copy to but not from NTFS partition.

I guess this calls for starting a new thread on freebsd-ports, since fusefs-ntfs is a port not in base system.  Then I would show more details.

I never knew FreeBSD had any capability for reading HPFS, though Linux has this capability.

I ran OS/2 from v1.3 (16-bit) to Warp 4 Fixpack 12, then it crashed during the single-digit days of April 2001.  CHKDSK, running automatically on reboot, ran amok and trashed the installation.  Subsequently, I was never able to boot OS/2 again, even from the installation/maintenance floppies.

I imagine, by now, OS/2, or now eComStation, has fallen far behind FreeBSD and NetBSD for hardware support.

Tom