How to Read IDE Hard Disk Formatted With NTFS on FreeBSD

I came across one of my first hard disks when home so I took it out and brought it with me to copy the data out. It was an IDE HD so I bought a cheap IDE to SATA adapter and connected it to my FreeBSD machine to copy the data. (Feeding the power directly from the motherboard’s molex connector was more stable for the old hard drive.) Here’s the steps that worked for me.

• Run pkg install fusefs-ntfs to install the NTFS read/write module.
• Run echo ‘fuse_load=“YES”’ » /boot/loader.conf if needed to load the NTFS module at boot time, every time.
• Create a mount point, mkdir -p /mnt/ntfs.
• Run geom disk list to find the name of the disk. Say it is ada0.
• Run fdisk ada0 to see which partition is NTFS formatted. In my case, it was the third partition.
• Run ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/ntfs to load the NTFS folder. Note ada0 is sda1. In my case, it complained of an unclean file but the partition was mounted read-only. Great for copying over the data!
• If there are partitions in FAT32, run mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/fat32 where da0s1 denotes ada0, partition 1 and /mnt/fat32 is the mount point provided its been created earlier.

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