Mount NTFS from "Live" system?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <37725.1511844646 at segfault.tristatelogic.com>, I wrote:

>...
>I just now installed 11.1-RELEASE on a USB stick and booted from
>that into the "Live" mode, and I was hoping to use that to try
>my test(s) again on the (possibly failing) harddrive, but it
>seems like maybe in Live mode there is no way to mount NTFS
>filesystems.  Bummer. :-(
>
>Is that actually true?  Is there an easy/fast way around it?
>
>
>P.S.  Should I maybe file a PR, suggesting the enhancement that
>the "ntfs-3g" tool be included in the Live mode image?  (It
>really does seems a pity if it ain't in there.)

It was suggested to me that I ought to post a follow-up / post mortem
regarding this issue, just to close out the topic.

Bottom line:  After much fiddling and gnashing of teeth, it turned out
that I had a failed/failing harddrive.  The specific one that failed...
in a rather odd way... was a 3-year-old out-of-warranty WD "blue" 320GB 2.5"
laptop drive that I'd been using on occasion as a scratch drive.  (I've
got these clever things called Kinwin KF-255-BK "trayless" hot-swap bays
on the front on my systems that let me easily insert or remove a 2.5"
or 3.5" drive any time I want.)

Anyway, the drive was failing, but I didn't know it because it just
started to get real real slow.  The fact that it was failing was ultimately
confirmed by attempting to run the built-in "long" form firmware diagnostics.
That should have taken only about 1 hour to run.  I left it running overnight,
and it -never- finished.  The drive is now in my e-waste pile.

I have -never- had any WD "black" drive fail on me, but I don't believe
that I'll be buying any more of the "blue" ones.  (The fact that this one
failed is rather inexplicable, because even though it was 3 years old,
it had less than 1,000 power-on hours on it, and less than 200 power-ups.)

In this case, having a FreeBSD "live" system with support for NTFS may
perhaps not have gotten me to the ultimate resolution of the problem any
faster, but I still do think that it would be a Good Idea to include the
ntfs-3g thingy in the normative release images... because you never know
when this might be a great help.

Then again, perhaps if I had just started with a mini/memstick image then
I could perhaps have loaded ntfs-3g, over the net, into the "live" system.
Would that have worked?  I dunno.  I didn't try it.  Does anybody know?


Regards,
rfg