# Riddle me this: Storage woes! Broken gmirror, mounting problems, incompatible OSs



## FreeDomBSD (Oct 6, 2013)

So I'm just about to go insane. I am trying to consolidate few years of backups that are now in the hard drive form (3.5" & 2.5" SATA drives). I have two laptops that I'm working on to accomplish this task:

FreeBSD 9.1 (CLI-only) on a laptop and Ubuntu 13.1 on another laptop and a Windows 7 laptop.

I am not very comfortable in the CLI mode, but my gmirror is on one of the 1TB drives and it requires FreeBSD to be mounted. I have one external USB enclosuse that has three bays for 3.5" drives. I also have an external USB adapter for the 2.5" drives. The data on the following drives needs to be consolidated:

* three 160GB drives (2.5") NTFS
* two   250GB drives (2.5") NTFS
* one   1TB   drive  (3.5") gmirror

These are the drives that I have that are completely free of data and are ready for usage:

* two 2TB drives (3.5")
* one 1TB drive  (3.5") [another matching 1TB 3.5" drive can be put into use once it is liberated from gmirror data.


The goal is to create something like this:


https://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=235417&postcount=3



> FreeBSD virtual machine that I can cary on my USB drive that when activated/started would give me network access to the encrypted ZFS array (drives in my external USB enclosure).


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## FreeDomBSD (Oct 6, 2013)

To start with I figured out how to mount the gmirror properly and gained file access:

https://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=235406&postcount=20


Then I tried to format one of the entire 2TB drives under Ubuntu using gparted and then mount it using this method:

http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com/2012/01/howto-mounting-ntfs-partition-in-write.html

The mounting process failed. I have read that ntfs-3g potr hasn't been updated and so these problems are to be expected.

I thought of formating the 2TB with ext2, but FreeBSD does not suport the EXT2 out-of-the-box and I'd have to recompile the kernel -- something I'm not quite ready to accomplish.

The reason I wanted to format the 2TB drive with a non-UFS partition is to be able to plug in the 2.5" external drives and copy data to the 2TB drive under Ubuntu or Windows.

Now I do not know what to do at all.


Please help me


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## wblock@ (Oct 6, 2013)

FreeDomBSD said:
			
		

> http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com/2012/01/howto-mounting-ntfs-partition-in-write.html
> 
> The mounting process failed. I have read that ntfs-3g potr hasn't been updated and so these problems are to be expected.



NTFS is a terrible way to share files.  It's proprietary and writes to it count on reverse engineering.



> I thought of formating the 2TB with ext2, but FreeBSD does not suport the EXT2 out-of-the-box and I'd have to recompile the kernel -- something I'm not quite ready to accomplish.



FreeBSD supports ext2fs(5) fine, no kernel recompile needed.  Are you working from outdated instructions?


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## FreeDomBSD (Oct 6, 2013)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> FreeBSD supports ext2fs(5) fine, no kernel recompile needed.  Are you working from outdated instructions?




I may have been looking at the outdated instructions.


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