Mount NTFS from "Live" system?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Sorry.  Sort of a long story, just to get to the point...

One particular disk drive of mine seems to be acting up in some
pretty weird ways.  I think it may be starting to fail.  The
whole thing contains only one partition, formatted for NTFS, and
when I recently tried to just cat a file that is already on
there to /dev/null it took over 21 minutes to complete.  (The
file is only around 6GB.)  This test was done on Linux/Ubuntu.
Given the amount of time the file read took, something seems to
be VERY wrong with this harddrive.

For the life of me, I can't figure out where Ubuntu stores
low-level disk error messages.  I think they should appear in
/var/log/kern.log, but  don't see any disk errors in there.
(Sigh.)

So anyway, I would prefer to use FreeBSD to try to get to the
bottom of this problem with this specific harddrive anyway,
because I know FreeBSD rather better than Ubuntu, and I also
trust it more.

I just now installed 11.1-RELEASE on a USB stick and booted from
that into the "Live" mode, and I was hoping to use that to try
my test(s) again on the (possibly failing) harddrive, but it
seems like maybe in Live mode there is no way to mount NTFS
filesystems.  Bummer. :-(

Is that actually true?  Is there an easy/fast way around it?


P.S.  Should I maybe file a PR, suggesting the enhancement that
the "ntfs-3g" tool be included in the Live mode image?  (It
really does seems a pity if it ain't in there.)