Unable to mount FAT16 partition (Invalid Argument)

[Peter Erickson]

On 3/25/19 11:48 AM, JD wrote:
> On 03/25/2019 10:25 AM, Peter Erickson wrote:
>> While the partition is only 250M, anything is worth a shot at this 
>> point. Unfortunately, that didn't work either - same result. I'm glad 
>> that I'm not the only one that's stumped.
>>
>> # mount -t msdosfs -o ro,large /dev/ada1p5 /mnt
>> mount_msdosfs: /dev/ada1p5: Invalid argument
>>
>> On 3/25/19 9:21 AM, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>>> On 3/25/19 2:42 AM, Peter Erickson wrote:
>>>> I'm hoping to get some assistance mounting a FAT (FAT16?) partition 
>>>> created by the VMware ESXi installer (version 6.7.0). Every attempt 
>>>> to mount it on 11.2-RELEASE-p4, results in an "Invalid argument" 
>>>> error, without much to indicate what is wrong or how to resolve it. 
>>>> Any advice or direction would be much appreciated.
>>>
>>> I've had this problem in the past and solved using "-o large".
>>> According to the man page this shouldn't be your case (and I don't 
>>> remember how big a partition I was trying to mount), but, for the 
>>> price, it's worth trying :)
>>>
>>> HTH.
>>>
>>>   bye
> Assuming the device you entered (ada1p5) is the device in question,
> have you tried the option  -o fat   instead of msdosfs ?
> 
> Also, again assuming the device name is as you entered, have you tried
> dd if=/dev/ada1p5 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10
> and see what error mesage(s) you get.

I have not tried either of those. However, what version of FreeBSD are 
you using which has the "-o fat" option? I'm not seeing it in mount(8) 
or mount_msdosfs(8). (I'm using 11.2-RELEASE-p4.)

No errors result from trying to read from the device.

# dd if=/dev/ada1p5 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 0.003344 seconds (3136079225 bytes/sec)