# BSD hard drive in Mac OS X



## rich-bsd (Sep 24, 2010)

Hi I have FreeBSD 8.1 installed on a hard drive in my Mac Pro formatted as FAT32 with MBR partition scheme, but it doesnt show in OS X. 

It's greyed out in Disk Utility just displaying its identifier disk2s1 and also has no name in the boot loader. The disk was showing before FreeBSD was installed.

Is it possible to get it to show?


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## SirDice (Sep 26, 2010)

rich-bsd said:
			
		

> Hi I have FreeBSD 8.1 installed on a hard drive in my Mac Pro formatted as FAT32 with MBR partition scheme, but it doesnt show in OS X.


This doesn't make sense. You cannot install Freebsd on a FAT32 partition.

OS-X should have no problem reading/writing to a FAT32 partition. However it cannot read UFS formatted filesystems.


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## davidgurvich (Sep 26, 2010)

It makes perfect sense.  He installed to a partition which was FAT32 and the installer automatically changed the table to UFS which OSX can't read.  That looks like the installation went exactly according to the defaults.  If OSX were reading the the FreeBSD slice then something would be wrong.


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## Beastie (Sep 26, 2010)

Solution: create two slices, one UFS for FreeBSD and the other FAT32 for sharing data between FreeBSD and MacOS.


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## rich-bsd (Sep 27, 2010)

Ah ok! thanks for the answers guys. i thought FreeBSD can install & run on FAT32, but it looks like it was changed to UFS, which OS X cant read.


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## mecano (Oct 20, 2011)

Looks like it's possible to read ufs from OSX through MacFuse
http://blog.casualpenguin.com/2009/01/macfuse-mounts-ufs.html
http://osxbook.com/software/unixfs/
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1901

[edit]
Yes it works, I succeed in mounting a FreeBSD 7 drive on OSX. But at first sight it looks pretty useless, files with no "all" permissions are just missing!


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