mounting an external Hard Drive

[Ian Smith]

On Mon, 7 May 2007 19:55:33 +0200, cadu aranha <oxyopes at googlemail.com> wrote:

 > Hello people,
 > i have a USB external HD with FAT32 fs.
 > Today i connected it to my FBSD and
 > got the following mesg entry:
 > 
 > da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
 > da0: <SAMSUNG SP2514N 0000> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
 > da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
 > da0: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 30401C)
 > 
 > # ls /dev/da0*
 > /dev/da0        /dev/da0s1      /dev/da0s2      /dev/da0s5

Note the appearance of /dev/da0s5 ..

 > mount_ntfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt
 > #%     ok, it worked. Now
 > # mount_ntfs /dev/da0s2 /mnt2
 > mount_ntfs: /dev/da0s2: Invalid argument
 > 
 > #%    of course, it is a FAT32 filesystem. Then ...
 > # mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s2 /mnt2
 > mount_msdosfs: /dev/da0s2: Invalid argument
 > # mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s5 /mnt2
 > mount_msdosfs: /dev/da0s5: Invalid argument
 > # dmesg
 > mountmsdosfs(): disk too big, sorry
 > 
 > # fsck_msdosfs /dev/da0s2
 > ** /dev/da0s2
 > Invalid signature in fsinfo blockfix? [yn] y
 > Floating exception (core dumped)

Ouch; hopefully didn't screw up anything.  Check with Partition Magic?

 > I do not know what else could i do.
 > It was a 250G HG with NTFS. The whole could be mounted
 > by mount_ntfs. Then i split it in one NTFS and one FAT32
 > using Partition magic. Now i can mount the former and the
 > latter not. On windows there is no problem in mounting.

The FAT32 is in what DOS calls the 'Extended Partition', here da0s2.  It
could contain a number of 'DOS drives' like D:, E:, etc.  Here you have
made one 'DOS drive', probably 'drive D:', and it's accessed in FreeBSD
as slice ad0s5.  DOS 'drive E:' would be accessed as ad0s6 and so on;
this way you can mount multiple MSDOSFS, NTFS and HPFS 'partitions'.

So the 'Extended Partition' da0s2 is not mountable per se; try
'mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s5' and likewise 'fsck_msdosfs /dev/da0s5'

You'll still need the MSDOSFS_LARGE support if your FAT32 slice ad0s5 is
over 128GB by itself.

Cheers, Ian