Large msdosfs disk will not mount on RELENG_6

[James Wyatt]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 1:09 , Clayton Milos wrote:
>>> I just bought a large external hard drive for home backups (500g Western 
>>> Digital My Book).  When I plug it in to my machine (RELENG_6 from about a 
>>> week ago), the system sees the device just fine:
>>> 
>> I am very suprised at all that windows would allow you to format a 500G 
>> drive into a single 500G FAT32 partition.
>> 
>> As far as I am aware windows 2000 and xp will only allow you to format up 
>> to a 32G dive with FAT32. Any bigger and it will force you to use NTFS. The 
>> other strange thing is tht you are trying to mount /dev/da0 and not 
>> /dev/de0s1.
>> 
>> How did you format this drive ?
>
> It comes formatted FAT32.  I bought one last week as well, and tried to mount 
> it to extract the included software before repartitioning.  I finally mounted 
> it on an OSX box to copy the software to CDR.
 	[ ... ]

I had the same issue with a Fry's $99 special 320GB USB2/FW exernal HDD. 
Since I need to mount it with WinXP, Linux, and "GENERIC" FreeBSD, I was 
somewhat stuck. The way I got around it was to reformat it to ext2 and use 
the Win32 ext2fs driver from SourceForge.  I considered NTFS, but the 
FreeBSD support for NTFS didn't look practical to use at the time - Jy@