Formatting a USB hard drive to share between OpenBSD and Mac OSX

strickvl

I’m trying to transfer some network drivers onto my new OpenBSD system so I can install packages etc through a wireless connection. Obviously I can’t transfer these file through a network, otherwise this would be easy.

So I have a USB thumb drive and I’d like to transfer the files from a Mac OSX to my OpenBSD system.

How do I format the USB drive so that both systems can read the files? I’ve tried using Mac’s Disk Utility to format the drive as ExFAT, but OpenBSD doesn’t seem to be able to mount that either with mount or with mount_ext2fs.

Any suggestions for how I can make this work? Thanks!

Jay

Hello ,
You will need FAT32 file system.
For exFAT you will need : sysutils/exfat-fuse
Command to mount USB drive is:

# mount -t msdos /dev/sd1i /mnt/pen

strickvl

Hi! Thank you for this tip. The first thing I tried was FAT32 but that didn't seem to work. Not quite sure why.

What I ended up doing was this:

installing Tuxera NTFS on my Mac
formatting the USB drive with NTFS
transferring the files onto the USB stick
mounting the stick on my BSD computer (as per standard instructions) using the -t ntfs flag as specified in mount_ntfs(8)
then using fw_update(8) to install the drivers

Phew! It took a while to figure it out, but I learned a lot along the way.

In the future I'll want to figure out FAT32, I think, though. You're right, it's a more reliable crossover filesystem standard than NTFS.

Thanks for replying!

Only once the files were transferred