Mount FreeBSD UFS in OS X

jdhorner · 02-23-2008, 10:50 PM

I'm nearing the end of my patience here, so I'm definitely hoping someone has a suggestion that works. I've just spent the past two hours googling and message-board searching until my eyes were bleeding.

this is my situation:

I have an old celeron box that is running FreeNAS. It has served me very well for the past six months. However, I've wanted to consolidate space, power consumption, and drives, and have thusly purchased a buffalo linkstation live. That's not the problem, though.

I've taken each of the drives out of the old celeron tower, and they're all currently formatted as UFS. I THOUGHT I'd be able to put each in an enclosure, and connect them to my mac pro, where OS X would happily mount them and I could process files, deleting what's old, and copying over to the new linkstation what I'd like to keep.

Well, now I'm frustrated.

I'm running Leopard 10.5.2 on a 4-core Mac Pro, and when I plug in the USB enclosure containing the UFS-formatted drive with data on it, nothing happens. I checked System Profiler, and it DOES list the connected "USB 2.0 storage device", and Disk Utility shows the "233.8 GB Maxtor (...)" drive, and it's one partition, "disk1s1". However, that partition is grayed out, and when I click on it, and choose "Mount", it tells me the disk cannot be mounted.

I've searched, and the closest I seem to have come up with is the following command from the terminal, which tries to mount the disk as read-only:

Code:

mount -r -t ufs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/pleasework

which results in the mount command returning an error stating "Incorrect super block".

another suggestion I found was to attempt to pass the FreeBSD-specific UFS argument to the mount command:

Code:

mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/pleasework

but that doesn't work, as the Leopard version of the mount command doesn't seem to support that particular argument for the -o switch. (and this is confirmed after checking the 'man mount' page)

Are there any utilities, foss tools, workarounds, etc... AT ALL that you all might be able to point me to to try and mount a simple UFS file system within Mac OS X ?

hayne · 02-24-2008, 01:26 AM

I suspect that the version of UFS you have on those disks is not compatible with what OS X expects. E.g. OS X's UFS is always big-endian, even on Intel hardware (see: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_fs.html)

And I note an older thread with a similar problem:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=72744

jdhorner · 02-24-2008, 11:34 AM

Ahh, thanks for the kernelthread link.

And yeah, I found that older thread with high hopes, only to get to the end of it.

02-23-2008, 10:50 PM	#1
jdhorner Major Leaguer Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Montréal, QC, Canada Posts: 331	Mount FreeBSD UFS in OS X I'm nearing the end of my patience here, so I'm definitely hoping someone has a suggestion that works. I've just spent the past two hours googling and message-board searching until my eyes were bleeding. this is my situation: I have an old celeron box that is running FreeNAS. It has served me very well for the past six months. However, I've wanted to consolidate space, power consumption, and drives, and have thusly purchased a buffalo linkstation live. That's not the problem, though. I've taken each of the drives out of the old celeron tower, and they're all currently formatted as UFS. I THOUGHT I'd be able to put each in an enclosure, and connect them to my mac pro, where OS X would happily mount them and I could process files, deleting what's old, and copying over to the new linkstation what I'd like to keep. Well, now I'm frustrated. I'm running Leopard 10.5.2 on a 4-core Mac Pro, and when I plug in the USB enclosure containing the UFS-formatted drive with data on it, nothing happens. I checked System Profiler, and it DOES list the connected "USB 2.0 storage device", and Disk Utility shows the "233.8 GB Maxtor (...)" drive, and it's one partition, "disk1s1". However, that partition is grayed out, and when I click on it, and choose "Mount", it tells me the disk cannot be mounted. I've searched, and the closest I seem to have come up with is the following command from the terminal, which tries to mount the disk as read-only: Code: mount -r -t ufs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/pleasework which results in the mount command returning an error stating "Incorrect super block". another suggestion I found was to attempt to pass the FreeBSD-specific UFS argument to the mount command: Code: mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/pleasework but that doesn't work, as the Leopard version of the mount command doesn't seem to support that particular argument for the -o switch. (and this is confirmed after checking the 'man mount' page) Are there any utilities, foss tools, workarounds, etc... AT ALL that you all might be able to point me to to try and mount a simple UFS file system within Mac OS X ? __________________ sometimes i wish i could pipe my customers to /dev/null Last edited by jdhorner; 02-23-2008 at 10:54 PM. Reason: rather funny typo

02-24-2008, 01:26 AM	#2
hayne Site Admin Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Montreal Posts: 31,941	I suspect that the version of UFS you have on those disks is not compatible with what OS X expects. E.g. OS X's UFS is always big-endian, even on Intel hardware (see: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_fs.html) And I note an older thread with a similar problem: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=72744 __________________ hayne.net/macosx.html

02-24-2008, 11:34 AM	#3
jdhorner Major Leaguer Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Montréal, QC, Canada Posts: 331	Ahh, thanks for the kernelthread link. And yeah, I found that older thread with high hopes, only to get to the end of it. __________________ sometimes i wish i could pipe my customers to /dev/null

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