Freenas – mounting a FAT32 partition with the right charset to “the”

fat32truenas

I've just started off with FreeNAS and have got a bunch of data (300gb+) I need to get from a FAT32 partition which I need to shift to the FreeNAS ZFS partition.

FreeNAS has successfully mounted the FAT32 partition and can get to the contents, the only issue is that whever I try to do

mv, cp, tar

pax

to shift or create an archive of the files, it inevitably chokes on a file it finds with an odd character with an

Invalid argument

warning. The file name will be something like

foo?s bar.mp3

where the

will have been an apostrophe or such and FreeNAS doesn't understand it.

I understand I can mount the drive with a different charset to overcome this problem but can't find any reference to it online. Please could someone assist with the necessary arguments I need to use with mount and the syntax it takes, please. I can SSH to the box.

TIA

Best Answer

You can specify the charset to use for conversion at mount time. From man mount :

iocharset=value

Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and 16 bit Unicode characters. The default is iso8859-1. Long filenames are stored on disk in Unicode format.

Specify it in you fstab or through the -o switch if you're mounting the FS manually :

 mount -t vfat -o iocharset=<value> /dev/<xxx>

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Try mounting the filesystem with the iocharset option set to the encoding it uses.

From man mount under the "Mount options for fat" section:

   iocharset=value
          Character set to use for converting between 8 bit characters and
          16 bit Unicode characters. The default is iso8859-1.  Long file‐
          names are stored on disk in Unicode format.

See also under the "Mount options for vfat" section:

   uni_xlate
          Translate  unhandled  Unicode  characters  to  special   escaped
          sequences.   This lets you backup and restore filenames that are
          created with any Unicode characters. Without this option, a  '?'
          is used when no translation is possible. The escape character is
          ':' because it is otherwise illegal on the vfat filesystem.  The
          escape  sequence  that gets used, where u is the unicode charac‐
          ter, is: ':', (u & 0x3f), ((u>>6) & 0x3f), (u>>12).

and

   utf8   UTF8  is  the  filesystem safe 8-bit encoding of Unicode that is
          used by the console. It can be be  enabled  for  the  filesystem
          with this option or disabled with utf8=0, utf8=no or utf8=false.
          If `uni_xlate' gets set, UTF8 gets disabled.

Edit:

I'm sorry, that was Linux, this is for BSD (from man mount_msdosfs:

 -L locale
     Specify locale name used for file name conversions for DOS and
     Win'95 names.  By default ISO 8859-1 assumed as local character
     set.

 -D DOS_codepage
     Specify the MS-DOS code page (aka IBM/OEM code page) name used
     for file name conversions for DOS names.

Best Answer

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