In article <20031022130348.5d6a5466.arb@anand.org>,
Anand Buddhdev <arb@anand.org> wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>I'm very new to NetBSD. Just installed version 1.6.1 (sparc64) yesterday
>on a Sun E250 box. I was quite impressed by the simple but powerful
>install system. And in just a few minutes, I had a system up and
>running. I am ever more impressed with the rc system, and the pkgsrc
>collection!
>
>Now, I have a small problem. I have 2 disks in this box (sd0 and sd1). I
>installed NetBSD on sd0. sd1 had a single partition of type linux ext2,
>which I didn't touch during the installation. It has some data which I
>want to recover.
>
>After installation, I tried to mount this partition, but I was not able
>to. I did:
>
>mount -t ext2fs /dev/sd1a /mnt
>
>and I got:
>
>mount_ext2fs: /dev/sd1a on /mnt: Operation not supported by device
>
>I used disklabel to see what was wrong, and I saw that the partition was
>showing up as type 4.2BSD. I used the interactive mode of disklabel to
>set the partition to type "Linux Ext2". And then I tried to mount it
>again, and I get the same error message. But I don't understand what it
>means. Does anyone know what it means?

Yes, by default the generic kernel on the sparc does not have ext2fs support.
You can try to add:

file-system	EXT2FS

in your kernel config file and try to mount again. I don't know if anyone
has tried EXT2FS on a big-endian system, so you are walking into uncharted
territory. I would be interesting in knowing how it goes though!

christos