Recovering data from old drives

[Simon Tiplady]

I have 9 old individual SATA drives (2 from laptops, others from old pc's or *nix servers) and 2 old IDE drives which had a simple raid (can't remember exactly which raid version)

I'd like to preview the data on them and selectively move the files I want, how can I mount them on my FreeNAS (9.3)?

I don't want to waste time importing the entire drive into my FreeNAS pools, I expect much of the data to be duplicates of things I already have, or files so old that I no longer care about them.

--
FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201506042008
Uptime 2 days :) - Yes I'm a newbie

 

[dlavigne]

The only thing the 9.3 GUI offers is http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#import-disk. Assuming the filesystem is supported, this will copy the contents of the drive to the specified dataset.

 

[Simon Tiplady]

Thanks dlavigne, but as I said, a lot of the data is likely to be useless, seems a big waste of time to transfer everything and then delete 90% of it.
I'm happy to mount it via CLI tools, I've tried things like fdisk -l, but they don't work

# fdisk -l
fdisk: illegal option -- l

 

[dlavigne]

As you've discovered, fdisk on FreeBSD/FreeNAS is very different from the one on Linux

Depending upon the filesystem, you could try a manual mount (using FreeBSD mount commands) from Shell. Though, if you are more familiar with Linux, you may find it easier to mount the disks on your computer, gather up just the info you need, then transfer the files to the NAS (perhaps using scp).

 

[Simon Tiplady]

The only other devices I've got are an iMac and MacBookPro, neither of which will accept an external Sata cable.

I can see from "camcontrol devlist" that the following devices exist and then "gpart show" suggests it's the 1st part, but I'm still having problems mounting it.

Code:

[root@freenas] /dev# camcontrol devlist
<ST3500418AS CC38>                 at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (ada1,pass2)
<WDC WD10EFRX-68PJCN0 82.00A82>    at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0)
<Verbatim STORE N GO 1.00>         at scbus5 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,da0)

[root@freenas] /dev# gpart show /dev/ada1
=>       63  976773105  ada1  MBR  (465G)
        63       1985        - free -  (992k)
      2048  976769024     1  ntfs  (465G)
  976771072       2096        - free -  (1.0M)

[root@freenas] /dev# mount /dev/ada1s1 /mnt/external
mount: /dev/ada1s1: Invalid argument

What am I missing?

 

[Simon Tiplady]

Thought mount might autodetect the file system type, just tried with this and I think I'm getting closer, but I had to guess that this drive was ntfs, the drives all came from different sources so I'm not sure what file system is on each one.

Code:

mount -t ntfs /dev/ada1s1 /mnt/external
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.
fuse: failed to open fuse device: No such file or directory

 

[dlavigne]

Does kldload fuse fix that error?

 

[Simon Tiplady]

Perfect, thats great, mount has now worked :)

Now I can sit back and trawl through all this old data and work out what to keep and what to destroy!