Mounting Western Digital USB drive?

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Patrick Baldwin wrote:

> Hi, I'm trying to mount a 160 GB Western Digital USB 2.0 drive on a
> FreeBSD 6.2 system.  This seemed like it should be relatively simple,
> but:
>
> webmail# mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usbdrive
> mount: /dev/da0s1 on /mnt/usbdrive: incorrect super block
>
> OK, it seemed a good chance the USB drive was formatted with NTFS, so 
> I tried:
>
> webmail# mount_ntfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usbdrive
> mount_ntfs: /dev/da0s1: Invalid argument
>
> Further reading on mount_ntfs suggested that even if I got it to
> work, it's not quite what I want:  I want read & write access
> with compressed files supported.

If it doesn't mount as NTFS then FAT32 seems like a distinct 
possibility.  Try file -s /dev/da0s1 and see what it says e.g.

$ file -s /dev/ad10s6
/dev/ad10s6: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x58, OEM-ID "MSWIN4.1", 
sectors/cluster 32, reserved sectors 34, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 
255, hidden sectors 63, sectors 42299082 (volumes > 32 MB) , FAT (32 
bit), sectors/FAT 10323, reserved3 0x800000, serial number 0x43937937, 
label: "    SAMSUNG"

If it is NTFS (or you reformat it to be) then maybe ntfs-3g is what you 
want (should be in ports) but I've never used it.

If all else fails, can you connect to a a Windows machine and see what 
it thinks it is?  I fail to remember how you figure out file system type 
in Windows but right-click-properties on the disk might do it.

--Alex