I’m running SUSE 11.3 on hard disk (a). I have a second hard disk (b) which has FreeBSD loaded and would like to copy all that info onto (a), then reformat (b).
How do I mount hard disk (b) to achieve my objective?
Thanks
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Is it just one partition?
Post your
fdisk -l
result
Or through yast choose
yast–>system–>partitioner.
It won’t tell anything about the partitions you have to mount (the BSD slices). It wil just show the FreeBSD primary partition, which is not mountable and is only a container, just like the Linux extended partition.
Neither. Definitely not!
Look (toward the end) of this thread 11.2 partition isolation issue, where I wrote several posts about this kind of partitions … and finally a bug report as they show up as filesystem under Linux and appear on desktops where they have nothing to do.
I recommend the use of this script: Displaying partitions infos from hal daemon, as it seems particularly appropriate in this case. Querying either the hal or the udev daemon will show you all the partitions, including BSD slices with filesystem (ufs1 or ufs2) or “unknown” for the BSD swap partition (usually the second one - slice “b”). You can mount BSD slices read only runder Linux with:
mount -t ufs ro,ufstype=44bsd <device> <mountpoint>
for ufs1 filesystem and
mount -t ufs ro,ufstype=ufs2 <device> <mountpoint>
for ufs2 filesystem.
<device> being the Linux dev files /dev/sdbX of the different slices.
Thanks for your input everyone.
Still a newbie, what do I do with “Displaying partitions infos from hal daemon” script? Do I save it as a file then launch the filename? Then it’ll display these slices you mention. Then mount the slices ro as mentioned.
Getting there. 
Thanks
The halinfo script displays all the partitions, including BSD slices that you can not see with fdisk or Linux partitioning tools, so you can learn their names and their disk IDS (UFS partitions don’t have labels or UUIDS under Linux). You can use the informations provided by this script to write your /etc/fstab or mount your partitions manually as I described previously. Unix slices normally get numbered under Linux after the latest (DOS/Linux based) logical partition. If you have only FreeBSD on the second drive and no other primary or extended partition, I guess your BSD slices will probably be sdb5, sdb6, sdb7, etc … but you should use halinfo, as querying hal or udev can display the filesystem used on these slices. The command blkid will list the Unix slices too but only show “ufs” for both ufs1 and ufs2 formats. The command **file -s /dev/sdb5 **(for example) will show either “Unix Fast File system [v1]” or “Unix Fast File system [v2]”. If you don’t know the difference between ufs1 and ufs2 and you did accept the defaults while installing FreeBSD (not too long ago), all your partitions will propably be ufs2. One should be marked as “unknown” in halinfo. This is the Unix swap partition that you can not mount.
Just a remark in passing… Mounting a second har disk is something many people do. Mounting BSD slices is something only few people do … or try to figure out how to do. I’m asking the moderators if it wouldn’t make sense to rename this thread to better describe the problem. (?)