Mounting ORB media

Thomas H. Oliver · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2002 Posts: 34 Location: St. Paul, MN

Can anyone tell me how to go about mounting an ORB disk in Linux? The SCSI ORB drive is acknowledged to exist and apparently the removable disk is seen, but an error message states that the file system is not vfat or that the superblock is faulty (I use the particular disk all the time in Win2K).

delta407 · Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2002 5:43 am Post subject:

ORB disks can contain any kind of filesystem you want them to; if they work under Windows, it may be vfat, though it might also be NTFS.

Also, try "fdisk -l"ing the device to dump the partition table. It might give you some clues.
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Thomas H. Oliver · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2002 Posts: 34 Location: St. Paul, MN

bash-2.05a# fdisk /dev/sdb

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 268 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 262 2097120+ 6 FAT16
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(261, 21, 16) should be (261, 254, 63)

Command (m for help): q

bash-2.05a# mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ORB
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
or too many mounted file systems
bash-2.05a# mount -t msdos /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ORB
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
or too many mounted file systems

I should mention that the ORB media is partitioned in DOS by INIFDISK, a utility from SIIG. Also, such media have been unreadable in DOS since I installed an "upgrade" to the ORB drive firmware about a year ago. As of then the media can only be read/written in Windows.

Thomas H. Oliver · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2002 Posts: 34 Location: St. Paul, MN

My SCSI ORB drive is now able to read and write ORB media in Linux if the ORB disk has been formatted with the Win2K ORB tools (which produces a 2044 MB partition wrapped in an extended partition).

The reason that nobody was able to help with this problem is probably that nobody else wanted to access ORB disks in DOS. Let me explain:

I wanted to be able to restore my system with Ghost (and later DriveImage) from hard disk, CDROM, or ORB, but the ORB media formatted with the ORB tools couldn't be read by DOS, although the drive was seen. I stumbled upon the utility INIFDISK which was able to format ORB media so that it could be read by DOS. Unfortunately, I later installed a Castlewood firmware update, and after that DOS couldn't even see the ORB drive. Nevertheless, out of habit I continued to format the ORB media with INIFDISK. Linux, however, couldn't read the INIFDISK-formatted ORB media.

DOS still doesn't see the ORB drive, but who cares? If I ever need to restore my system with ORB, all I have to do is use Linux to copy the system image to a disk file or to CDROM and use this new copy to restore the OS.