Comments on: Mac OS X: Mounting FAT32 external hard drive via Terminal command line

By: Jay

Jay — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 06:12:33 +0000

I have a problem:
after this command:
sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/EXT_HD/

mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (0)

How can I fix it?
Thanks!

By: Jughead

Jughead — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:07:08 +0000

This is indeed appreciated. Gotten further than anywhere else with this guidance.

However…I get an error:

mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (0)

Any thoughts?

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:20:51 +0000

Thank you so much for this post! I put the command’s in as per your instructions in Terminal and the hard drive mounted after a restart, I was ready to start using data recovery software to retrieve 400GB!

Cannot understand why this info isn’t more readily available on apple sites & forums, I did loads of searches before finding this!

Thanks!

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:06:13 +0000

THANK YOU! After two hours of reading unhelpful articles, this finally saved me from Mac compatibility hell. Like you, the FAT32 partition on my Seagate GoFlex 1TB external HD was erroneously listed as NTFS. No idea why – Macs are just rubbish. But it works now after the manual mount so thank you very much for posting this.

By: Kirk Ireson

Kirk Ireson — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:32:37 +0000

Yunita,

Make sure that you first made the mount point with “sudo mkdir /Volumes/EXT_HD”. Also, use the “ls /dev/disk*” command (after plugging in your external hard drive) to determine the drive number – looks like you did and saw it was disk2. Other than those two things, I don’t have much of an idea what could be wrong.

By: Yunita

Yunita — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:32:00 +0000

it didnt work on my hard drive. after I typed the last command “sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/EXT_HD/”, what i got is an “input/output error”.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:15:58 +0000

Try diskutil unmountDisk since you mounted the disk with diskutil. And note that diskutil unmount only unmounts a single volume, which is not what you want.

By: harddrive external

harddrive external — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:02:03 +0000

thanks i needs this information, i have the same problem with you.

By: Raubvogel

Raubvogel — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:42:36 +0000

The reason you had a hard time to umount could be because it was being scanned by the OS or something:

strangepork:~ raub$ sudo lsof /mnt
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
mds 32 root 14r DIR 14,5 442 2 /mnt
mds 32 root 16u REG 14,5 28 29 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/indexState
mds 32 root 18r DIR 14,5 1326 26 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB
mds 32 root 29u REG 14,5 53248 54 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/store.db
mds 32 root 30u REG 14,5 53248 55 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/.store.db
mds 32 root 31u REG 14,5 0 57 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/journalLive
mds 32 root 37r DIR 14,5 442 2 /mnt
mds 32 root 40u REG 14,5 0 58 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/journalExclusion
mds 32 root 42u REG 14,5 0 59 /mnt/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/4C73D5F1-F8B7-45A9-B38E-6229932EBFAB/journalSync
fseventsd 37 root 9u REG 14,5 0 266 /mnt/.fseventsd/000000000118a6be
strangepork:~ raub$

By: metanomi

metanomi — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:08:37 +0000

you can try “sudo umount -f /Volumes/EXT_HD/” to force unmount when you get resource busy errors in os x