Hi folks,

Despite the various mounting woes that one can find with the search feature of this fine forum, noone seems to have reported anything about BSD partitions. Maybe people who usually deal with BSD know what they're doing (I guess so). I don't usually deal with BSD, and at any rate I haven't found anything directly related to my problem.

I'm in charge of cracking root access to a machine of PC architecture with FreeBSD, NetBSD, Win98 and an unknown flavor of Linux installed, and it has been agreed to backup as much data as possible before any cracking. First I want to secure the most valuable data and some program source (if I can find it), and then I'd like to clone the hard-drives, followed by cracking the machine. Knoppix is my tool of choice for the fist two tasks. I used the 5.0.1 EN CD version.


The players
When I run fdisk -l I find two hard-drives:
/dev/hda, an IDE drive of 160 GB
/dev/hdb, an IDE drive of 40 GB

The layers
The BSD /etc/fstab shows the following mount configuration:
On hda: 6 BSD partitions on hda, one swap partition, one MSDOS partition (Win9
On hdb: 5 BSD partitions
CD-ROM: 5 drives (It's primary purpose is for recording audio and burning CDs.)
External: 2 USBstick mount points

There are also some Linux partitions that are not mounted by BSD. (These are essentially irrelevant for the moment.) I wish I had thought of actually saving the fsdisk output.

The problem
For the task of cloning I plan to use dd. However, for securing the valuable data I would just like to mount the BSD partitions, find and select the relevant files, and copy them to a USB hard-drive. My problem so far comes with mounting. Knoppix recognizes the drives and makes fstab entries for all the partitions, including the BSD, MSDOS and Linux partitions. It has a problem, however, with mounting the BSD partitions.

The /etc/fstab entries in Knoppix for the BSD partitions (and all others) uses "auto" for fstype. After failing to mount by right-clicking the desktop icons and selecting mount, I decided the simplest thing to do would be to just use explicit mount commands. I opened an X terminal (Konsole), switched to superuser, and after studying the mount manpage to refresh my memory, entered such commands as
Code:
# mount -t ufs -o rw /dev/hda2 /media/mnt/hda2
# mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/hda2 /media/mnt/hda2
# mount /dev/hda2 /media/mnt/hda2
... and so on.

Nothing worked. I didn't copy the error messages, but it was along the lines of
Code:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda2,
or too many mounted file systems
Now I'm not too sure about the "too many mounted file systems", I just found that code snippet on the forum and it resembles what I recall. I remember Knoppix finding a total of 14 partitions on hdb; together with 7 or so partitions on hda, could there be some kind of limit? I don't think so, because when I gave the above mount commands, none of the other partitions were mounted.

The question
What could I be overlooking? FreeBSD definitely uses the ufs filesystem by default, and that is what is declared in the BSD fstab. Why should Knoppix have this trouble?

Thanks