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I have a flash drive that was formatted on a quite old Android phone. I would like to access the data from macOS.

This is diskutil's output:

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *124.0 GB   disk4
   1:             Windows_FAT_32                         124.0 GB   disk4s1

I can't mount the drive, I guess the partition uses Fdisk, not GPT, could this be a problem?

This is what I've tried:

sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk4 tmp/fat32 
mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (0)
mount: /Users/anton_vesnin/tmp/fat32 failed with 71

 diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk4s1          
Volume on disk4s1 failed to mount
If you think the volume is supported but damaged, try the "readOnly" option

Read-only access is sufficient for my purposes, thanks in advance.

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3
  • Are you willing to risk fsck (disk utility repair) making changes to this? (Basically how important is the data and would you wait and pay for data recovery if it’s more important to see what you had?) your diskitil is OK, but a fdisk or gpt -r -vv show /dev/disk4 might get some ideas how to understand the 0 block size error.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Sep 15 at 15:16
  • 2
    Do you have access to another computer you could try this with, maybe one running Windows or Linux?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Sep 15 at 15:51
  • I didn't have access to another computer just right now. And the data is important, so I was thinking, is making image of partition with dd and fsck image?
    – sheikh_anton
    Commented Sep 15 at 17:48

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

Finally I found this way to read the data:

dd if=/dev/disk6s1 of=pendrive.img
hdiutil attach -verbose -readonly pendrive.img

Then I was able to copy everything except few files with long names in non-ascii charset, what was ok in my case. Thanks everyone for your advices.

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2
  • I'm glad you could recover the files. Could you mark your answer as accepted? You will not only collect the reward but also help others with a similar issue. Thank you in advance.
    – jaume
    Commented Sep 17 at 5:21
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    I will when stackexchange will allow it. Apparently I have to wait 20 hours to accept my own answer, 6 of them left 🤷‍♂️.
    – sheikh_anton
    Commented Sep 17 at 7:05
1

Please try this:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
mkdir /tmp/fat32
mount -t msdos /dev/disk4s1 /tmp/fat32
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4
  • Did not help, same results.
    – sheikh_anton
    Commented Sep 15 at 20:08
  • I wouldn't mess with it then. Put it aside until you can try mounting it on a Linux or Windows host.
    – Linc Davis
    Commented Sep 15 at 20:32
  • What about if I do dd image of it and mess with the image?
    – sheikh_anton
    Commented Sep 15 at 20:34
  • 1
    That’s OK, unless the drive is on the verge of failing and becoming unreadable. But that may already have happened.
    – Linc Davis
    Commented Sep 15 at 21:22

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