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| author | Matthew Lemon <matt@matthewlemon.com> | 2022-09-13 08:53:18 +0100 |
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| committer | Matthew Lemon <matt@matthewlemon.com> | 2022-09-13 08:53:18 +0100 |
| commit | 720c5c3e4706b83a098a61db90e8ca6f87c49fe2 (patch) | |
| tree | 6c13e4fb66199dbb7e585fa60f5d12b0db3a3d34 | |
| parent | 490bd5e9398cf4cfc42610f804c2e41d6224d330 (diff) | |
draft blog post
| -rw-r--r-- | content/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd.md | 31 |
1 files changed, 31 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/content/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd.md b/content/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bc16237 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Trouble with USB drives in OpenBSD" +date: 2022-09-13T08:31:41+01:00 +draft: true +categories: ['Computing'] +tags: ['openbsd'] +--- + +Coming from a Linux background, creating drives on OpenBSD is a little weird. + +You use `fdisk` to create a suitable "meta" partition on a drive - one of four available, and then inside that you use `disklabel` to create up to 16 paritions that are used for your files. +Details are given, as ever, in the [OpenBSD FAQ](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html). + +I use [git-annex](https://git-annex.branchable.com/) to manage my file archive and I love git-annex! +I use it completely manually (I don't use git-annex assistant) and I've allowed a single repository to become far too big, spanning across multiple drives and servers, but that is an issue for another day. + +I needed to move a large video file from the internal drive (managed by git-annex) on my desktop computer which runs Debian, so that I could watch it on my laptop which runs OpenBSD so i needed a USB drive suitable for both systems. + +FAT32, I thought. Great. + +Creating a FAT32 drive in OpenBSD is of course doable. + +Of course I believed that you needed to have a MBR on the drive, so I ran `fdisk -iy sd3` to create the default OpenBSD `A6` meta partition. (I go the device name from doing `sysctl hw.disknames`). + +Then I created a new `i` parition: `disklabel -E sd3`, `a i`, `w`, `q`. + +Next, the file system: `newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/sd3i`. + +This last command did't produce any output, it just quit after thirty seconds or so. +From my experience, `newfs` can take time, so I wasn't concerned about the time it took, but there was a problem. +After running `newfs` and running `disklabel -h sd3`, I saw that the `i` partition was gone. |