[Courses] [FS] Lesson 5

[Meredydd]

On Sunday 14 December 2003 11:54, Francis Rossi wrote:
> I have joined this course although I'm male,
Well, you're in questionable company - so am I ;^)

> On my Linux (RH9) I tried recently to mount a
> partition where I have FreeBSD installed (sunfs file system according
> to a hardware detection program in Linux). I added the following line
> to /etc/fstab:
>
> /dev/hdb4 /mnt/freebsd sunfs noauto,owner,users 0 0
>
> It didn't work. Is it impossible to mount such a partition on Linux?
"It didn't work" isn't really very specific - a mount can fail for a 
variety of reasons. Try mounting it from the command line rather than 
trying to do it automatically with fstab. So, in this case:

root at yourbox:~# mount -t sunfs /dev/hdb4 /mnt/freebsd

...and see what errors it gives. There are four usual reasons why a 
mount can fail:

* Does this mount point exist?
	Basic, but oh so easily forgotten (also very easy to do if you 
accidentally mounted another volume over it - which is why you 
shouldn't play with /mnt if you mount your CDs at /mnt/cdrom).

* Is the block device valid?
	Usual symptoms of this one are I/O errors. Check the partition exists 
with the fdisk command.

* Does your kernel support this filesystem implementation?
	Look in /proc/filesystems - is sunfs listed there? If not, is it a 
module? Try "modprobe sunfs".

* Is this volume formatted with this filesystem implementation?
	This one shows up as "bad superblock" errors - are you sure that sunfs 
is the one you want? Try rebooting into FreeBSD and checking the mount 
table there.

I hope this rough-and-ready guide helps...

Meredydd