Mount NTFS from base system?

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Thu Jan 15 23:22:17 UTC 2015


On Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:05:15 +0000 (UTC), Thomas Mueller wrote:
> 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.

You would need to install rsync from ports.



> 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.

Yes, R/W operations on a USB stick tend to be slower
than on directly attached hard disks. :-)



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

If you have FreeBSD 8 somewhere, it could also work.
Maybe you can even "go back in time" and use of the
older live system CDs (converted for USB booting)
from earlier versions (v8, probably v7 and v6) which
had mount_ntfs in the OS.



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

That could indicate a severe file system defect. In
worst case, you could install sysutils/ntfsprogs and
use those tools for access, or at least to obtain a
copy of the file system and work with that (instead
of with the original).



> 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.

Probably no big problem there.



> 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.

See "man ntfscp" for explanation:

NAME
       ntfscp - copy file to an NTFS volume.

SYNOPSIS
       ntfscp [options] device source_file destination



> 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.

That's probably a good idea, but I think participants
of freebsd-questions@ could also benefit.



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

If I remember correctly, it has been possible to access
HPFS volumes with the NTFS mount command, at least on
Linux, but that memory is already several years old.
I don't know if it's still possible.



> 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.

Terrible experience. Mine was similar: The OS/2 installer
trashed the partition table and deleted all other
partitions. Armed with a calculator and "Norton
Disk Doctor" (part of "Norton Utilities", at a
time when you didn't associate "The Yellow Plague"
immediately!) I was able to resurrect everything
except the 1st partition which the OS/2 installer
had already overwritten - instead of using the
partition it was told to use. This ended by attempts
to use it at home.



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

"Fallen behind"? As far as I understand, OS/2 is
dead, and only few brave users keep it on artificial
life support with eCS. ;-)

But hey, it wasn't that bad for the time it has been
designed. Multitasking, an object oriented desktop,
REXX...



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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