Solved Mounting external hard drive question

garaksarr · Jan 29, 2022

Hi everyone,

I've created a new UFS partition on my external drive, and I'm a bit confused as to why I need to mount the drive using /dev/da0 instead of the partition itself (/dev/da0p1).

gpart output:

root@freebsd:/media # gpart list da0
Geom name: da0
modified: false
state: OK
fwheads: 255
fwsectors: 63
last: 1953525127
first: 40
entries: 128
scheme: GPT
Providers:
1. Name: da0p1
   Mediasize: 1000204845056 (932G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Stripesize: 4096
   Stripeoffset: 0
   Mode: r0w0e0
   efimedia: HD(1,GPT,093d256f-811d-11ec-95ec-6805ca2e33ac,0x28,0x74706d60)
   rawuuid: 093d256f-811d-11ec-95ec-6805ca2e33ac
   rawtype: 516e7cb6-6ecf-11d6-8ff8-00022d09712b
   label: (null)
   length: 1000204845056
   offset: 20480
   type: freebsd-ufs
   index: 1
   end: 1953525127
   start: 40
Consumers:
1. Name: da0
   Mediasize: 1000204885504 (932G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Stripesize: 4096
   Stripeoffset: 0
   Mode: r0w0e0

Here is what I get when I try to mount the partition:

root@freebsd:/media # mount /dev/da0p1 /media/backup/
mount: /dev/da0p1: No such file or directory

/dev/da0p1 does exist, though:

root@freebsd:/media # ls /dev/da0*
/dev/da0        /dev/da0p1

As I said before, mounting /dev/da0 works fine. To make sure, I created a directory on the drive, unmounted /dev/da0, mounted it again and the directory was still there.

I'm pretty new to FreeBSD, so sorry in advance if this gets asked a lot.

Thank you for your time.

jb_fvwm2 · Jan 29, 2022

I think that it's because it's usb-mounted, I've a thumbdrive similar, and the commands you used to initially prepare the disk were/are similar to what I used, whatever those were.

Phishfry · Jan 30, 2022

garaksarr said:
mounting /dev/da0 works fine.

Yes you have defiantly done something wrong here. Maybe you formatted da0 I dunno.
Here is the steps to make an external drive usable.
gpart create -s gpt da0
gpart add -t freebsd-ufs da0
newfs -U /dev/da0p1

Cath O'Deray · Jan 30, 2022

garaksarr said:
… I've created a new UFS partition …

Welcome to FreeBSD Forums.

I guess, you created the partition but (then) not the intended file system. I mean, not in the intended place. …

Postscript

garaksarr said:
… mounting /dev/da0 works fine. …

… I mean, that's easily reproducible if I accidentally-on-purpose add the file system to the device (instead of its partition), however I can not yet reproduce the No such file or directory symptom for the partition – please see below.

Cath O'Deray · Jan 30, 2022

Phishfry said:
newfs -U /dev/da0p1

Without soft update journaling?

Cath O'Deray · Jan 30, 2022

garaksarr said:
mount: /dev/da0p1: No such file or directory

Please, was that copy typed (manually typed), or pasted from a terminal window?

garaksarr · Jan 31, 2022

grahamperrin said:
Please, was that copy typed (manually typed), or pasted from a terminal window?

Pasted from a terminal window.

garaksarr · Feb 2, 2022

Phishfry said:
Yes you have defiantly done something wrong here. Maybe you formatted da0 I dunno.
Here is the steps to make an external drive usable.
gpart create -s gpt da0
gpart add -t freebsd-ufs da0
newfs -U /dev/da0p1

That did the trick. Not sure what I did wrong... I probably ran newfs on /dev/da0 instead of the partition itself.
Thanks!

Cath O'Deray · Feb 2, 2022

Cool.

For what it's worth, I should also enable soft update journaling.

tunefs(8) flag -j (lowercase).