Strange fdisk and mounting question

[RJPugh]

Hello, BSD users! I have an odd question, and I'm not entirely sure where to post it, or where to look for pointers.

My system (A Dell Dimension 4550 series) has three hard drives and one DVD-Rom on the IDE bus. The first disk (BSD calls it ad0) has Windows-XP. The second (ad1) has PC-BSD 8.2. The DVD-Rom appears to be holding ad2's "spot." Clearly BSD can mount it's own disk, and I have been able to manually mount the Windows-XP drive. The problem is with the third drive, ad3.

When I do an fdisk on /dev/ad3 (to see if the system even knows the disk is there), it gives me a readout of the two Fat32 partitions I have on it. Nothing unexpected there. However, I can't mount either of these partitions. When I look in /dev, I see an entry for ad3, but not for the two partitions. I was expecting something along the lines of ad3s1 & ad3s2, or ad3p1 & ad3p2. In my previous BSD install (7.2), I had ad3s1 & ad3s2, but 8.2 doesn't provide them.

It's important that BSD be able to read the third drive. That's where most of my work files are. I put them this Fat32 partition because both of my OS's can use it without doing anything fancy.

How can I go about implementing this? I know that 8.2 has some elaborate labeling conventions, so this may be quite simple, but I don't know where to start. I haven't yet found an FAQ, man, or forum thread that clearly answers this. I suspect I'm overlooking something painfully obvious.

How should I proceed? Thanks in advance.


RJPugh