Backing up & accessing CF

freakalad

First off, I need to state that I am no BSD pro of any sort. I've a fair bit of general Linux experience (especially on Ubuntu), but I've been playing with pfSense, m0n0wall & IPCop (even SmoothWall before that) for some years now.

Right-o! Recently I got my hands on a ALIX system with pf pre-installed on a CF.
As is prudent, the first thing I did was pop it open (because that's what you do with new hardware), and pulled the CF card

I have an external USB multi-card reader/writer, & loaded it (connected to my Ubuntu system - Karmic-64)

Do a sudo fdisk -l & find the disk/drive/partition in question:


Disk /dev/sde: 8012 MB, 8012390400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 974 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x90909090

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde4   *           1           4       25000   a5  FreeBSD
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(3, 28, 41)
This disk has both DOS and BSD magic.
Give the 'b' command to go to BSD mode.

Disk /dev/sde4: 25 MB, 25600000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x90909090

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde4p4   *           1           4       25000   a5  FreeBSD
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(3, 28, 41)

Note that it doesn't quite know what's going on & that the BSD partition is on #4

OK, now to make thorough backups. I'm making backups of both the entire block device & the partition, because I don't quite know what to expect from "BSD magic":


NOWDATE=$(date +%Y%m%d)
sudo dd if=/dev/sde4 of=pfsense.disk.$NOWDATE.img
sudo dd if=/dev/sde4p4 of=pfsense.part.$NOWDATE.img
tar vfvz pfsense.snapshot.$NOWDATE.tar.gz pfsense.disk.$NOWDATE.img pfsense.part.$NOWDATE.img
rm -vi pfsense.disk.$NOWDATE.img pfsense.part.$NOWDATE.img

OK, so now I'm pretty confident that I can safely break anything on the disk without having to worry too much about the consequences :p
Now, for the entire purpose of my original exercise: to mount the disk (ro at this stage):


sudo mkdir /mnt/pfsense
sudo mount -r -v -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sde4p4 /mnt/pfsense
ls -Al /mnt/pfsense

Ta-da! :)
This was not very well-documented elsewhere, so there you go.

Have fun!