Mounting UFS drives - is this a unix holy war?

[gabrielle harrison and Paul van den Bergen]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 03:05:14 +1000, Freddie Cash <fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca>  
wrote:
>> When I switched to FreeBSD in 2001 (I've been back 6 mo), my tests
>> convinced my that neither FreeBSD or Linux could reliably use the
>> other's partitions, so I wound up transfering files by tar'ing into a
>> raw partition from Linux and untar'ing in FreeBSD.  I hope things have
>> improved, but you might want to do a good diff test.
>
> FreeBSD 4.11, 5.x, and 6.x can all access ext2 filesystems without
> issues, and can mount clean ext3 filesystems as ext2.  Pre-6.0 systems
> have a shutdown bug where the system won't cleanly shutdown if there
> are mounted ext2 filesystems.
>
> Linux systems should be able to mount UFS1 filesystems without issue.
> You'll need a very up-to-date set of mount tools in order to reliably
> mount UFS2 partitions (default on FreeBSD 5.3+), though.  Both can be
> mounted using "mount -t ufs".

thanks.

So now the question is, why can't the (k)ubuntu disk manager see UFS  
partitions correctly? Or perhaps more importantly, how can I get it to see  
other partition types properly...

Actually, while we are on the topic, way back in win3.11/dos5 times I  
encountered a program that could read and write pretty much any disk  
format available at that time... tape, mac, amiga, commodor, the lot,  
including a whole bunch of really obscure ones that I'd never heard of. I  
can understand that one might have trouble with NTFS, being a closed  
source format, but why is there even an issue with other open source  
formats???  surely there is a library for accessing each or multiple disk  
formats?  Given that software existed 15 years ago that essentially  
allowed acces to several dozen existing commercial formats, is there such  
a project (perhaps sourceforge?) that doeswhat seems like a  
straightforward and usefull task - preferably without the user ever  
knowing they are being tricky!




-- 
Dr Paul van den Bergen
Chance favours the prepared mind