coffeebranlaxative

FreeNAS mount an external fat32 hard drive.

Here’s the situation: You have an external hard drive with a fat32 file system.  You just finished setting up your new NAS unit that is running FreeNAS and you want to move the data from your external hard drive to the NAS unit.  You will need to hook up a monitor and keyboard to the NAS unit.  Hopefully, you have some USB ports that aren’t being used on your NAS unit as well because you’ll need to plug in the hard drive.

1. From the FreeNAS menu deal select option 6) shell.
2. Determine the dev name of your drive (mine was da0s1)
3. Make a a folder to use as a mount point. (I used “mkdir  /mnt/mybook” )
4. Mount your external drive specifying the filesystem type. (”mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt/mybook” )
5. Now you can move some data around like: “cp -R -v /mnt/mybook/data /mnt/data” or whatever you need to do.

Other information: The above applies to a embedded installation of FreeNAS.