The Unix file system (UFS) also called the  BSD Fast File System or FFS is a file system supported by many Unix like operating systems. This grandfather of file system was improved heavily by Marshall Kirk McKusick and is the standard file system for FreeBSD.  Also in Crossmeta driver the root file system image is being used as FFS inside the kernel.  Later UFS2 was introduced to support 64-bit file system structures, which Crossmeta cannot mount on windows.

Now with Crossmeta FUSE for Windows there is read-only support not only for UFS2 but also for various other incarnations of UFS

sun86, sun, sunos ,44bsd, ufs2, 5xbsd, hp, nextstep-cd, nextstep, openstep

Building UFS fuse program

Using the crossmeta filesystems project repository and with Mingw32 Cross Compile on cxfuse I could knock-off a quick port of ufs.exe. This is would allow mounting of all types of UFS volume on Windows platform.

  1. Setup the FUSE for windows build environment in Linux
    sudo yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-winpthreads-static
    git clone https://github.com/crossmeta/cxfuse
  2. Setup work area for building UFS filesystems code and witch to crossmeta branch.
  3. mkdir work
    cd work
    git clone https://github.com/crossmeta/filesystems
    git checkout crossmeta
  4. Build ufs.exe as follows using the makefile.mingw
    cd filesystems/filesystems-c/unixfs/ufs
    FUSE_DIR=~/cxfuse make -f Makefile.mingw
  5. The executable file ufs.exe can be run any Windows running Crossmeta FUSE

How To mount UFS on Windows?

  1. Install  Crossmeta FUSE from the latest package file.
  2. Make sure the drivers are loaded
    c:\program files\crossmeta> service_crossmeta start
    
    c:\program files\crossmeta> net start cxfuse
  3. Run the FUSE program ufs.exe
    c:\program files\crossmeta> ufs.exe --dmg <diskimage> --type ufs2  /mnt
  4. The ufs2 volume will be mounted read-only and your data is available in v:\mnt windows folder.
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