OT: fdisk

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Sat Oct  2 18:51:14 2010
> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2010 16:51:50 -0700
> From: Robert <traveling08 at cox.net>
> To: Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com>
> Cc: "freebsd-questions at freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: OT: fdisk
>
> On Sat, 2 Oct 2010 17:00:00 -0600 (MDT)
> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 2 Oct 2010, Robert wrote:
> > 
> > > Greetings
> > >
> > > I am in deep with the wife. Her computer went belly up. It was
> > > running XP pro and I had backups going to a second drive. I can no
> > > longer access that drive.
> > >
> > > I pulled it and attached it via USB to one of my FreeBSD machines
> > > but it will not mount. It is a 500G hard drive and I get _wild_
> > > results just looking at it with fdisk.
> > >
> > > ~> fdisk /dev/da1s1
> > > ******* Working on device /dev/da1s1 *******
> > 
> > Wait a minute... shouldn't that be just "da1"?  da1s1 is the first
> > slice (partition), and the data there should be your XP filesystem,
> > probably NTFS.
>
> Warren,
>
> You are right. Here it is:
>
>  ~> fdisk /dev/da1
> ******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=60801 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
>
> Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
> parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
> cylinders=60801 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
>
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> Information from DOS bootblock is:
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 7 (0x07),(NTFS, OS/2 HPFS, QNX-2 (16 bit) or Advanced UNIX)
>     start 63, size 976773105 (476939 Meg), flag 0
> 	beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
> 	end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63
> The data for partition 2 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 3 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 4 is:
> <UNUSED>
>
> Which looks a lot better. I can mount /dev/da1 and it shows 
>  ~> ls -l /mnt
> total 70044
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      2560 Dec 31  1600 $AttrDef
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         0 Oct  1 09:09 $BadClus
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   4194304 Dec 31  1600 $Bitmap
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      8192 Oct  1 09:09 $Boot
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         0 Oct  1 09:09 $Extend
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  67108864 Oct  1 09:09 $LogFile
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      4096 Oct  1 09:09 $MFTMirr
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         0 Dec 31  1600 $Secure
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    131072 Oct  1 09:09 $UpCase
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         0 Oct  1 09:09 $Volume
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     45124 Aug 18  2001 NTDETECT.COM
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         0 Oct  1 17:29 System Volume
> Information 
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel       193 Oct  1 09:12 boot.ini
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    222368 Aug 18  2001 ntldr
>
> But I cannot mount /dev/da1s1
>
>  ~> sudo mount_ntfs /dev/da1s1 /mnt
> mount_ntfs: /dev/da1s1: Invalid argument

what does 'ls -l /dev/da1*' show?