how to mount an already freebsd paritioned external usb drive onto a new freebsd install

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 12/31/06, Steve <steve at digitalbluesky.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was running FreebBSD 5.x until a few days ago at home on a little shuttle
> cube server with a celeron processor when my hard drive appeared to develop
> multiple problems and finally died.  I had a western digital external usb
> hard drive attached to the server that I used for daily backups.  So I got
> a new hard drive and installeed FreeBSD 6.1 on it.  I have plugged in the
> WD external usb drive and ran:
>
> dmesg
> camcontrol devlist
>
> And the WD usb drive seems to recognized by the system and all is
> well.  The WD usb drive has a freebsd partition on it already.  I want to
> mount this drive so I can start to move backed up data to the new box, but
> reading through the handbook and doing a google search, I'm still not clear
> exactly how to do it.  I don't remember how I had setup the old box to
> mount the drive as I had done it almost two years ago.
>
> If someone can tell me what to do or point me in the right direction it
> would be appreciated.  I really don't want to mess this up.

Assuming the drive you want to mount is /dev/da0, you
should first determine what slices and partitions it
has. It's very easy, just "ls /dev/da0*" for that. Let's
pretend you see something like this:

/dev/da0
/dev/da0s1
/dev/da0s1a
/dev/da0s1b
/dev/da0s1c
/dev/da0s1d
/dev/da0s1e

It might be a lot simpler or a lot more complicated. This
exact result means you have one slice (s1) and several
partitions (a-e). "b" is a swap partition, "c" represents
the whole slice, you only have to mount "a", "d" and "e".

mkdir -p /mnt/a /mnt/d /mnt/e
mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt/a
mount /dev/da0s1d /mnt/d
mount /dev/da0s1e /mnt/e

Use "mount -r" instead of just "mount" to make them read-
only (for safety).

Good luck!