Fetching files from (unfortunately) journaled filesystems
 

Recently, my computer died and I got a beater of a loaner off a friend; the only thing I could get running on it was OpenBSD - and I'm (90%) happy to say I'm quite please with it; it's small, fast and extremely well-documented.

I am facing several problems with the switchover (namely compiling some much-loved applications, but that's another thread), the biggest being no support for journaling file systems.

I have a 500GB hard drive with only one partition (that is almost full) on it, and practically all of my personal files are on there (music, movies, programming projects, etc.). The partition is formatted with ReiserFS 3. Luckily, I had a more organized, less-bulky copy of some of the more important stuff on a 160GB Western Digital Passport.

I have tried mounting the Passport (formatted in Linux using VFAT) but no luck (I tried messing around with "mount_msdos").

Is there any way I could get/build even a read-only driver for ReiserFS, or VFAT? Or is there another method I could use for getting my files off of these drives and in a usable setting under OpenBSD?

check disklabel wd0 (or whatever your hd)
mount -t ntfs /dev/"your partition" /mnt

check manpages for disklabel and mount:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.c...86&format=html

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.c...penBSD+Current

HTH :)

Thanks for your response!

I tried that, unfortunately, I get the following message:
Nothing is mounted to /mnt right now.

Have you made sure that the ntfs module has been loaded??

man modstat
man modload
man modunload

Yes - and it is.

One thing I was quite surprised at, was that with "modstat", you actually need to know the name of the module to gather information on - I had figured it would behave more like "lsmod" and less like "modinfo" (on Linux, that is).

It came to me last night, while I was going to sleep, I think I may get a friend to come over with their computer, show them how to set up an NFS share, and I will just grab what I imminently need that way. :)

NTFS support is both experimental & not enabled in the default kernel. If you want NTFS support (& I would only recommend reading NTFS partitions, not writing to them...), you will need to enable NTFS in GENERIC, followed by recompiling the kernel. If you are unfamiliar with how to compile OpenBSD's kernel, study Section 5.3 of the official FAQ:

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#Bld

OpenBSD does not support loadable kernel modules. All functionality has to be compiled into the kernel directly. As stated previously, NTFS support is enabled by default in the kernel. The functionality will need to be enabled in GENERIC followed by recompilation.

I think what I would do is start a Linux Live CD like Slax and create tarballs or rsync everything on the drive to another drive in ext2. Then start OpenBSD and copy everything back. If you can borrow another big USB drive or another box with big drives it will be alot easier. If not there are some free hosting sites that should allow you to save big files.

Grab the e2fsprogs-1.27p5 pkg and you can work with EXT2/EXT3 files. I have used it and it works well.

I feel your pain btw. I recently lost a box just as I was bringing it up to move files off of it! It took me all day to install NetBSD on it (CD drive failed along with one of the HD) and it couldn't read the CD enough to load all of a basic NetBSD installation. I finally finished it by moving packages over from an NFS server on another box and then rsyncd everything off the dying box to the new box.

I apologize for any ambiguity I have caused. I missed a contraction. It is true that NTFS support is not enabled by default in OpenBSD's kernel, but functionality can be enabled can be by uncommenting the ntfs option found in GENERIC followed by recompiling the kernel.

My apologies.

ocicat, Randux, thank you both very much for your posts. :)

My plan to do an NFS share didn't work out so well - I borrowed a beater of a laptop off of my mum (running Slackware), and while I could export the filesystem (through NFS), OpenBSD just wouldn't look at it - something about RPC stuffs not running; it started to tick me off because I had spent about an hour-and-a-half trying to make sure everything was right on the OpenBSD box.

So, Randux, I may just follow one of your suggestions and borrow another large hard drive off of somebody, format it as ext2 and...you know the rest.

:) I will post my results!

Indienick, maybe it wasn't OpenBSD's fault. You have to have portmap, statd, and mountd running on the NFS server side. I have mounted NFS shares from/to Slackware/OpenBSD. Ocicat can tell you what has to happen for OpenBSD to mount a foreign share. If I can remember right it's nothing more than

mount -t nfs nfs.server.address:/foreign/path/to/share /local/path/to/share

Anyway good luck and don't give up!

Oh no - I wasn't trying to insinuate that it was OpenBSD's fault in the least. What I was getting sore at, was I had quickly become reliant on OpenBSD's wonderfully detailed documentation (FAQ and man pages). I don't recall what had/hadn't been mentioned; I believe the message that was getting printed was "RPC: portmap not registered" or something like that, yet I had portmap running.

Oh, well.

I will give it another shot when I get home. Thanks, again! :)

Side question: how does installing e2fsprogs give me access to ext3 file-systems? I was under the impression that things like journaling file-systems were reliant on architecture inherent in the kernel? All this talk of, "NO - OpenBSD does NOT SUPPORT JOURNALING FILE SYSTEMS!" made me curious as to this notion.

PS. As a side note, I had to laugh and felt a bit awkward, when I went to a Linux conference in October and it threw people for a loop that my interest in Linux and UNIX were completely separate from my job field. There I was, in conference rooms filled with people who live, sleep, eat and breathe Linux (and *BSD) and there I am, a machinist and mechanical designer, being all "hey, this is a hobby!"

I don't know what goes on inside the package, but it does give you EXT2/EXT3 support in OpenBSD. I used it there and on FreeBSD to share files on USB sticks with my Linux boxes since I didn't want to use FATxx. It was the only cross platform choice I found.

If you have problems getting an NFS server running on Slackware, just ask here in the Slackware forums or maybe on #slackware on freenode (but be prepared for a high noise level...groan). I have mine working, we can probably figure it out :p

Okay - I haven't changed anything and now, OpenBSD will mount the Slackware-hosted NFS share! :D

Thank you all, again, for your help.

Yeah, sometimes you have to reboot after you change /etc/exports :p

Did you get all your files back?