Mount NTFS from base system?

[Thomas Mueller]

from Polytropon and my previous post:

> > I had Rod Smith's gdisk on it, and subversion, see rsync was
> > not there.

> You would need to install rsync from ports.

I did, on later installations, both FreeBSD and NetBSD.

> > 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. :-)

Maybe it was a particular allergy of FreeBSD to the particular model of USB stick?

Normally, FreeBSD amd64, and NetBSD, would take about 45 minutes.

> > 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.

Actually, I have a FreeBSD 8.2 i386 installation on an IDE hard drive, now in a Sabrent USB 2.0 enclosure, no longer possible to update on that hard drive partition.

> > 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).

Maybe it could also be an update to NTFS on Microsoft's end?

File system is too big to make a full copy, no place to put it, 5 TB.

But it also indicates a lack of robustness in FreeBSD 9.2.  NetBSD failed to mount the partition, but didn't crash, in that case connected to a USB 2.0 port because USB 3.0 is not yet working in NetBSD.

Or there could have been a defect in the NTFS.

I remember the DVD that came with Seagate Business Storage NAS: readable in Linux and Haiku but no files showed in FreeBSD and NetBSD.

FreeBSD 9.2 installation on USB stick is too old to be readily updatable; easier to start anew with 10-stable or 11-head.

There is an osFree project at osfree.org attempting to create an open-source analogue to OS/2 Warp 4, but at the pace it's going, they will be hard-pressed to produce anything meaningful by year 4000, meaning nobody currently living onm earth will live long enough to see it.  There is/was even a FreeVMS project, but that seems to have died, website no longer there.

Tom