USB Hard Drive Wont Mount FAT32/UFS Mac OSX

[PdxDefatty]

I am attempting to a) get PCBSD to mount (any) USB hard drive from the VMWare image (7.0.1 updated, since 7.0.2 VMWare appears to be missing). I formatted the drive on the MAC 10.4.11 as a 'ufs' drive, and the MAC recognized it and auto-mounted it.

PCBSD recognizes the drive correctly using camcontrol at:
da0, scbus1 on umass-sim0 bus 0: target 0 lun 0 (pass0,da0)

However, mount -t ufs /dev/da0 /mnt/usb fails.

I have also tried formatting this same USB (western digital self contained) as FAT32, and had basically the same result. Have been unable to get PCBSD to recognize a generic memory stick as well.

Any suggestions/ideas appreciated.

[TerryP]

I wasn't aware the modern Macintosh's supported UFS, always thought they used HFS+ as native.


FreeBSD/PC-BSD understands FAT32 and should understand the older FAT16/FAT as well. I've also used PC-BSD with FAT32 volumes of up to 160~180gb.

[PdxDefatty]

Thanks TerryP for response.

(update: 12/18/08:14:56) After installing 7.0.2 on an actual partition, I determined that the auto mounting was working properly with the NTFS formatted USB drive. So all of the below must be VMWare related. I will try again when/if the 7.0.2 VMWare image is posted. thanks for the assist.

Re: MAC/UFS
I was able to format the external USB using the MAC -ufs switch, and the MAC automounted the drive. However, VMW-PC-BSD didn't recognize it, so I decided to punt on that approach.

Re: FAT32
I was able to mount a memory-stick which is formatted with FAT32. If I am unable to get NTFS to work, plan B is to retry using FAT32. There appears to be an issue relating to cluster size for very large drives.

Re: NTFS
I initialized the partition as NTFS under VMW-PC-BSD, then formatted under WinXP.

Moved the drive to my Vista machine which is running VMWare Player, booted PC-BSD with the USB drive connected. Device da0 was detected on startup, and correctly reported the volume label.

GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1 is ntfs/NTFSWD160

Subsequent attempts to mount using variations of

mount -t ntfs-36 /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb
Could not open /dev/da0s1: Invalid argument.

all failed.

However, the USB autoloader continued to report and correctly identify the NTFS label of the device. I know I can read/write the /dev/da0 because I did it with dd.

I'm wondering if the VMWare container is interfering with this device in some way. I'm going to search for supporting posts on potential anomalies that might be caused by VMWare(?) I was hoping to verify the latest PCBSD release using the VMWare container, however, failing that, I can install it on it's own machine.

Thanks in advance for any further tips on VMWare/PCBSD or NTFS related.