Properly Mount a Hard Drive and Access Files

U

undercurrent77

Hello,

I’m using nomadBSD on a flash drive as a means to investigate a hard drive that was previously installed in XigmaNAS and nas4free. I realize this may not be the place for a post like this, but I did post over on the nomadBSD forum and didn't see much traction (link below). This is more of a general BSD question I believe, so I thought I'd try here as well. Anyway, I’m in the process of transitioning all of my drives onto a Ubuntu server install (hopefully that’s not a dirty word around here!). I was able to mount the other UFS formatted drives and successfully migrate my files, but one drive is giving me some trouble. Mounting using the dsbmc on Nomad works fine and the drive shows up in the file browser and through the terminal. However, it is empty apart from a lost+found folder which when selected throws an error about not having permission to access.

I’ve run "fsck" and "testdisk" on the drive. Both came back clean.

Using df -h in the terminal shows that 458G of the 1.8T drive is occupied (which is accurate).

If I try to mount the drive with the command “sudo mount /dev/da1p1 /mnt/drive/” in the terminal, it says “/dev/da1p1: no such file or directory” and fails to mount.

“gpart show” shows the drive is GPT freebsd-ufs formatted.

I’ve tried all of these terminal commands in both single user and multi-user mode as well and see the same behavior. The drive in question is currently attached to the computer using a usb-sata adapter. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can properly mount this drive and access the files located on it?

original nomadBSD post here: https://forum.nomadbsd.org/t/issue-mounting-ufs-drive/1501

Thank you!
 
undercurrent77 said:
nomadBSD
Click to expand...
? Never heard of it.
But it seems to be some FreeBSD based derivate. So why not check what can get out of
FreeBSD Handbook
Otherwise all I can tell is Forum Rules and Guidelines (REQUIRED READING):
Non FreeBSD related topics are not part of this forums; it's neither our choice, nor responsibility if you've chosen something else but FreeBSD, and they don't have a supportive community.
Ours is, but on FreeBSD, of course.
So why not install FreeBSD instead, and try again? 😁
 
Thanks Maturin,

I did read the forum rules, that's why I posted in the nomadBSD forums first and then linked it here. Just thought I'd see if any of you experienced users may have had some insight :) Figured it couldn't hurt to learn all I could about the issue!
 
Well, I went ahead and cleared off an old PC and loaded up freebsd to try again like you suggested. Took what I've learned so far and after some finagling with the journal settings got the drive to mount properly! Still no files showing unfortunately when search the mounted drive.
 
Here it is:

/dev/da0p1: Unix Fast File system [v2] (little-endian) last mounted on /mnt/da0p1, volume name Backup, last written Fri Feb 28 20:11:21 2025, clean flag 1, read only flag 0, number of blocks 488378635, number of data blocks 473041063, number of cylinder groups 3048, block size 32768, fragment size 4096, average file size 16384, average number of files on dir 64, pending blocks to free 0, pending inodea to free 0, system-wide uuid 0, minimum percentage of free blocks 8, TIME optimization

Hopefully no typos in all of that.

Note, the drive in question was da1p1 under nomadBSD. Now that I'm working with a freebsd installation it's da0p1.
 
Since it is not very common to discuss such things here, but nevertheless:
1. try to do all the work without sudo ($ sudo...). Under pure root ($ sudo su, su...);
2. try to directly connect the disk (without USB-SATA-adapter);
3. yes, do what covacat suggested.

Off-topic. I have never had a normal relationship with NomadBSD.
And in general, it is very difficult to find something in BSD distros, when I, as a regular
user, still do not understand why in MidnightBSD when entering a command at the end of
device files the "%" sign is added... :)
# cd /dev/ada0% ada0p1% ada0p2% ada0p3%
 
Okay, running that command gives:

/dev/da0p1
Last mounted on /mnt/da0p1
Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
Phase 3 - Check Connectivity
Phase 4 - Check Reference Counts
Phase 5 - Check Cyl groups
57102 files, 120042453 used, 352998610 free (2458 frags, 44124519 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)

FILE SYSTEM IS CLEAN
 
USerID I'm running this on a laptop so I unfortunately don't have the luxury of bypassing the adapter. I figured I'd have more issues running freeBSD as a live USB disk on my server system.

Yes, I've found some strange things that I don't understand with midnightBSD and NomadBSD. Have to be honest though, the lack of GUI scared me off of freebsd at first, but it's definitely working better!
 
Yes. That's right. But for me, all these BSDs, except for "Open", "Net" and "Free", are lap-dashed creations that are sawed at night by one and a half digger men. As rude as it sounds.
In my lexicon, these are distro-scum, folk art. I've never taken "Midnight", "nomad" or "Ghost" seriously...
So, load it up, poke it with a stick and forget about it.
 
undercurrent77 said:
sudo mount /dev/da1p1 /mnt/drive/ [... ] /dev/da1p1: no such file or directory [...]
Click to expand...
In a test VM I've seen this too (normal user sudo mount), but only once, I couldn't reproduce it anymore.

During this specific test scenario, the super user could mount when normal user sudo'ing couldn't. Perhaps try "-ro" as well.
 
undercurrent77 said:
Yes, I've found some strange things that I don't understand with midnightBSD and NomadBSD.
Click to expand...
The disk can also be examined via mhdd (victoria). It depends on what you are pursuing and at what level.
If I'm not mistaken, you have the file system level.
The problem is that not all platforms confidently read and work with UFS/ZFS.
Eternal nastiness occurs not only in NomadBSD.
The well-known Clonezilla, which officially works with UFS, could not mount this very disk with UFS on my PC (as a place to store the image, i.e. the "Destination" on which the backup is supposed to be made). Although the disk with the OS (UFS) - "Source", which needs to be compressed into an image, is successfully compressed and packed.
Give me Clonezilla EXT4, even if you knock your head on the wall.
The Clonezilla distribution could not mount my HDD with UFS. Therefore, because of this, I have to
boot from GhostBSD and copy the image folder (i.e. backup) from HDD (ext4) to HDD (UFS).
I don't know any other way to make my life easier.
 
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