Trouble mounting external usb hard drive ufs formatted

Question

Level 1

0 points

Trouble mounting external usb hard drive ufs formatted

Hello, I have a bsd ufs hard drive that I want to mount in Mac OS X (10.4.9 PPC). Upon plugging it in Mac OS X tells me that it doesn't recognize the drive and asks if I want to initialize the drive, I of course click no. I investigate using the Terminal, and I've discovered that the drive is /dev/disk6 ...upon entering "sudo file -s /dev/disk6" (minus the quotes) I get:

/dev/disk6: Unix Fast File system (little-endian), last mounted on /mnt, last written at Sun May 13 05:22:02 2007, clean flag 1, number of blocks 244193292, number of data blocks 240328927, number of cylinder groups 2597, block size 16384, fragment size 2048, minimum percentage of free blocks 8, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational speed 60rps, TIME optimization

So it obviously sees and understands the drive...yet whenever I try to mount it (after making /Volumes/txt) via a command like (minus the quotes): "sudo mount -vt ufs /dev/disk6 /Volumes/txt" I get the following error (minus the quotes): "/dev/disk6 on /Volumes/txt: Incorrect super block."

In addition when I try the following to get more information on the disk it also fails (minus the quotes): "sudo fdisk /dev/disk6" output: "fdisk: /dev/disk6 is not a character device or a regular file"

So what am I doing wrong? This must be possible since the core of Mac OS X is BSD and this is a BSD UFS formatted external USB HD and in addition file -s shows that Mac OS X does understand the drive...so what must I do to get this drive to mount??? Thanks! 🙂

P.S. Other drives that are mounted I've noticed have a location of /dev/disk#s# but I cannot seem to find the s# for this drive....please help, thanks 🙂

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on May 22, 2007 11:56 PM

Reply

Answer 1

jbibbins Author

Level 1

0 points

May 23, 2007 12:50 AM in response to jbibbins

Also in case it matters here's the command my friend used to format the drive and its output:

username removed_forprivacy# newfs -O 1 /dev/da4
/dev/da4: 476940.0MB (976773168 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size
2048 using 2597 cylinder groups of 183.69MB, 11756 blks, 23552 inodes.
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
32, 376224, 752416, 1128608, 1504800, 1880992, 2257184, 2633376, 3009568,
3385760, 3761952, 4138144, 4514336, 4890528....

It looks like there are some superblock backups specified there, can I use one of them to successfully mount the drive and if so how?

P.S. I am into archiving old vintage computing related files and my friend had a good bunch of them and so I asked him if he could make me a copy, he said sure but he'd need me to buy a 500gb hd for him to put the files on. So I did, he then informed me that the files were on a BSD machine and so we concluded that UFS would be best (since I saw UFS as a format option in Disk Utility and since the core of Mac OS X is BSD I assumed connecting a BSD UFS drive to Mac OS X wouldn't be a issue). So he then formatted the HD UFS, copied the files to the HD and mailed the HD to me. I then unpacked the HD and tried accessing it on Mac OS X and that brings us to where we are now 🙂. Due to distance issues it would be best if I could figure out a way to get to the files on the drive in its current format of BSD UFS, so if anyone could please help me that'd be greatly appreciated (as opposed to say mailing the drive back to him and asking him to reformat the drive in a different format and recopying all the files). Thanks! 🙂

Reply

Answer 2

Jun T.

Level 4

2,185 points

May 23, 2007 1:59 AM in response to jbibbins

I have never connected a UFS disk to Mac, so I don't know whether it should automatically mount or not. When you try to mount it manually,

sudo mount -vt ufs /dev/disk6 /Volumes/txt

I think you must specify the UFS partition (disk6s1, for example) instead of the entire disk (disk6). You may try

diskutil list
diskutil info disk6

or DiskUtility.app to get more info about the disk.

sudo fdisk /dev/disk6

fdisk requires a character special file. I guess /dev/rdisk6 will work.

PowerMacG4, PowerBookG4, iMac(C2D) Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Reply

Answer 3

jbibbins Author

Level 1

0 points

May 23, 2007 10:44 PM in response to Jun T.

I have never connected a UFS disk to Mac, so I don't
know whether it should automatically mount or not.
When you try to mount it manually,

sudo mount -vt ufs /dev/disk6 /Volumes/txt

I think you must specify the UFS partition (disk6s1,
for example) instead of the entire disk (disk6). You
may try

diskutil list
diskutil info disk6

or DiskUtility.app to get more info about the disk.

sudo fdisk /dev/disk6

fdisk requires a character special file. I guess
/dev/rdisk6 will work.

PowerMacG4, PowerBookG4, iMac(C2D)
Mac OS X (10.4.9)

As stated in my OP when I first connect my external USB hard drive Mac OS X presents me with a dialog stating that it doesn't recognize my hard drives format and asks if I want to initialize the drives, I of course clicked Ignore. So because of this Disk Utility doesn't see the drive and so the two diskutil commands didn't help any unfortunately. sudo fdisk -d /dev/rdisk6 didn't work, it just resulted in a bunch of zeros being printed...anymore ideas? I find it very strange that Mac OS X's core is BSD and the Disk Utility provides the ability to make UFS formatted hard drives yet Mac OS X seems unable to mount UFS formatted hard drives, there must be something I'm overlooking...thanks! 🙂

Reply

Answer 4

Jun T.

Level 4

2,185 points

May 24, 2007 6:15 AM in response to jbibbins

Some googling indicates that UFS is endian-dependent, and MacOSX (or Darwin or NEXTSTEP) uses big endian UFS irrespecive of the CPU's endianness. It seems NetBSD supports Apple-UFS (big endian UFS). I don't know any detail about this. Try googling by yourself.

HTH

PowerMacG4, PowerBookG4, iMac(C2D) Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Reply

Answer 5

May 24, 2007 2:12 PM in response to Jun T.

how do i post a new topic?

Reply

Answer 6

jbibbins Author

Level 1

0 points

May 24, 2007 11:41 PM in response to silentcall

your spam is not appreciated...

Reply