This is a quick post on how to mount an external USB NTFS formatted hard drive (or memory stick) to FreeNAS. All that’s needed is to load the fuse driver, but it had me stumped for a bit until I found it in a forum post.
First things first, let’s plug in our drive and find out the device ID FreeNAS assigns it.
# dmesg ... umass1: <ASMedia AS2105, class 0/0, rev 2.10/1.00, addr 3> on uhub4 da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 target 0 lun 0 da1: <ST950042 0AS 0002> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device da1: 40.000MB/s transfers da1: 476940MB (976773168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 60801C)
Now we create a mount point for the drive and try mount it like we normally would.
# mkdir /mnt/usb # mount -t ntfs /dev/da1s1 /mnt/usb/
You’ll receive the following error:
fuse: failed to open fuse device: No such file or directory
Now lets load the fuse driver and try again.
# kldload fuse # mount -t ntfs /dev/da1s1 /mnt/usb/ # ls -l /mnt/usb total 4589868 drwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 4096 Sep 25 17:48 $RECYCLE.BIN drwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 0 Nov 27 14:25 .Trashes -rwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 4096 Nov 22 18:15 ._.Trashes ...
SUCCESS!
It’s probably easier to load the driver on boot instead of loading it manually like I have above. I haven’t tried it, but it should work if you call it from loader.conf. I can reboot my NAS at the moment, but if someone wants to give it a shot and post to the comments, that would be great. You can follow instructions on how to edit loader.conf in a previous post [1] of mine.
[1] – http://www.kristijan.org/2010/11/freenas-realtek-network-card/
Excellent Post!! Thanks for your help. It worked perfectly!!
Forgot to reload fuse 🙂 Thx for post
This helped me a lot. One thing to point out in case anyone else has this problem… I could’t load fuse, and I saw from another website post to copy fuse from /usr/local/modules to /boot/kernel and it wouldn’t let me as /boot/kernel was read only. To solve this, I simply typed kldload /usr/local/modules/fuse.ko and it worked. Hope this helps someone.
Thank you for the information. I also need to use kldload /usr/local/modules/fuse.ko as suggested by Jon with with freenas 8.0.2
Graham
Thanks for your help. It worked perfectly!! 😀
Afer searching for over an hour. I finally came across this post. It worked! Thank you very much!!!
Does this work for freenas 9.3
Hi Saif,
I no longer use FreeNAS, so unsure if this is still required in later versions.
what if my external drive is using ext4 filesystem?, because i’ve try that method but cannot work
Hi Dedi,
Unfortunately, I no longer have a FreeNAS (moved to using a Synology), so I can’t offer any assistance with this specifically.