Other Moving a hard drive from FreeBSD system to Windows

H

hominamad

Hi - I have a FreeNAS system that was running for years and finally died. I would like to move the two hard drives from it to a spare Windows box I had. Should this be possible to do or are the FreeBSD drives formatted in a way that Windows can't read it? I dropped the drives in, and can see them in Windows disk manager, but can't access them, assign drive letters, etc. Hoping this is possible to do somehow - trying to recover some data from there.

Thanks,
H
 
hominamad said:
trying to recover some data from there.
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Windows won't be able to read any file system that is commonly used on FreeBSD. If copying data out is your goal, use FreeBSD and the tar(1) command to archive it first.

Beyond that, there isn't anything terribly special about drives. You'll just need at least one partition in a file system that Windows supports to use it on Windows (FAT32, exFAT, NTFS).
 
There are two problems.
 
First, those two drives are probably part of a RAID. Windows does not support any of FreeBSD’s RAID structures, so it won’t be able to access the RAID.
 
Second, there are probably either UFS or ZFS filesystems on those drives. Again, Windows supports neither of them.

As 6502 mentioned, it is probably best to set up a new FreeNAS or FreeBSD system for those drives. Another possibility might be to run FreeBSD inside a VM on Windows to access the drives, but I’m not sure how easy or difficult this would be.
 
As others stated, you need another ZFS-enabled OS (typically another FreeBSD) to read the file.
Warning: NTFS (/Windows) does not support files longer than 260 chars (unless last versions with registry hack).
Therefore this can be tricky.

If you mount the ZFS drive on "whatever" BSD, and you have enough free space, you can archive by using something "manegeable" (USB NTFS formatted drive, for example)
Code: 
zpaqfranz a /myusbdisk/mybackup.zpaq /zfsdrive/home-or-whatever
Then, after booting into the Windows machine and using the zpaqfranz.exe (Windows' version)
Code: 
zpaqfranz x d:\mybackup.zpaq -to c:\myrestoredfiles\ -fix255
 
Thanks for the info. So basically, I need a FreeBSD system in order to read it. I wasn't using ZFS or any form of RAID, and this was from a system set up 11 years ago - so I'm not sure what the format is. I guess it's UFS most likely? I'm not very familiar with FreeBsd, so was just hoping I could get it to work quickly with what I do know.

Should I be able to read the drive with any Unix variant? Could I use Ubuntu Desktop I wonder? I guess I could either boot into that, or maybe try the VM approach. If could somehow mount it as a network share, that should be enough for me to get the files I need off it. What is the most straightforward way to do this? I'm a tech guy, but don't have tons of experience with Linux. I know I could figure it out, but hoping I don't have to invest hours into it! Thanks again.
 
Just an update, didn't get the entire thing working because I was crunched for time, but did get the files I needed. I made a bootable USB of Ubuntu with UI. Booted my machine to it and was able to mount the two drives I had moved in. I started trying to set up Samba but was running into some permissions issues, so I just found the files I needed and uploaded them to Google Drive, and then downloaded them to my other PC. A bit dirty solution, but worked in a pinch. If I have more time, I may spend some getting the Samba share up, but this got me what I needed for now. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
 
hominamad said:
What is the most straightforward way to do this?
Click to expand...
The most straightforward way is to boot FreeBSD and use tar. Something like: tar -acf backup.tar.zst /mnt

Linux has some experimental support for UFS and read-only, I would not trust it for this case. Just use FreeBSD, that's where the file system is native anyway.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Or use FAT32 & tar.gz many files with long names.
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In fact no, in the sense that the problem is not to make a backup or whatever of long filenames, but to restore on Windows.
Even trivial case-collisions (pippo.txt and PIPPO.txt) are very annoying if you do not use "something" that can automatically fix such type of incompatibilities
 
fcorbelli said:
Even trivial case-collisions (pippo.txt and PIPPO.txt) are very annoying if you do not use "something" that can automatically fix such type of incompatibilities
Click to expand...
Such as using Cygwin which has no problem creating and accessing case-sensitive file names on Windows?
 
hominamad said:
Hi - I have a FreeNAS system that was running for years and finally died. I would like to move the two hard drives from it to a spare Windows box I had. Should this be possible to do or are the FreeBSD drives formatted in a way that Windows can't read it? I dropped the drives in, and can see them in Windows disk manager, but can't access them, assign drive letters, etc. Hoping this is possible to do somehow - trying to recover some data from there.

Thanks,
H
Click to expand...
If you can see the drives in Windows Disk Manager, the next thing to do is to slow format them with NTFS. Looks like you did back up useful data from those drives, so you can go ahead with the reformat. Then the drives will become usable again.
 
When you switch ntfs between windows and freebsd and linux you find the partititions alot of times "unclean". And then you find fsck takes long or is not supported. It's ok when you mount in read-only.
 
Alain De Vos said:
When you switch ntfs between windows and freebsd and linux you find the partititions alot of times "unclean". And then you find fsck takes long or is not supported. It's ok when you mount in read-only.
Click to expand...
I never had to do any fsck... From time to time, windows did complain about an 'improperly unmounted volume', but even on a 2 TB drive, the fix was really fast, because it amounted to just clearing the 'dirty' bit on the volume. But FreeBSD's ntfs-3g driver never complained. I even have fusefs.ko loaded by default in my /boot/loader.conf :P
 
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