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Old 3rd March 2011
RJPugh RJPugh is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Culpeper, VA
Posts: 45
Default RESOLVED. I think.

I think I've resolved this, but in a roundabout way. Here's how it happened.

The two partitions are now available through Dolphin, and are mounted through /dev/fuse# strings. Currently they are mounted in the /media directory, according to disk label. I'm hoping I can edit fstab to auto-mount them at a location more to my liking. I need to read up on that. This new method of tracking devices caught me unawares.

I only discovered this after a long song & dance with the partition utility. Apparently the disk drive had some other problems that needed to be fixed before FreeBSD would work with it (a few bad sectors and some link errors, I think). I ended up having to rebuild the partitions after all, which is something I wanted to avoid. But, what's done is done, and I have a clean backup (on an external drive), so nothing is lost.

I used sysinstall to rebuild the drive, just to make sure that FreeBSD had a record of what I was doing. I was hoping that it would create /dev files along the way, but it didn't. It made those /dev/fuse files instead. Anyway, the partitions used to be Fat32, but now they are NTFS. Windows-XP doesn't seem to care, and FreeBSD is much happier with the NTFS layout. That struck me as odd, but in the end I guess that doesn't matter.

Once I had the two partitions set up, I made a side trip to Windows-XP to format them. Again, Windows-XP didn't mind the new file system, and the formatting went off without a hitch. It was more concerned with locating files it couldn't find any more. I'll restore the contents of the partitions tonight; that should keep WinXP happy.

Back in FreeBSD, opening the Dolphin file manager provided two new icons for the partitions, which I was able to manually mount. Doing a "df" gave me the device strings; I had never heard of /dev/fuse0 and friends before. Note that before rebuilding the partitions, Dolphin didn't have those two icons, and conventional command-line mounting didn't work. It took a while, but FreeBSD can now use those two important partitions.

At any rate, I'm still hoping to tweak fstab to put these partitions where I want them. But if that doesn't work, I can live with how things are now. Once I do a file dump to restore the data in the new partitions, my system will be just like it was before. But with a more current FreeBSD instillation.

Ah, the things we do to keep our little red daemons happy.
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