First of thank you for your replies and sorry that I couldn*t reply immediatly. Anthony : I forgot the partition part in the command cause plan9 didn't recognize the ext2 partition in a virtual drive created with fdisk from my linux command line. There where only the entries raw and ctl below /dev/sdD0 so I wasn't sure if they would appear after a mount from the device. It seems that virtual hard disks created with fdisk from linux command line are in some way misinterpreted. After creating it with a gparted out of a qemu session my data partition was recognized and I used your modified command. Thanks for your advice. In the meantime I read also about u9fs and 9pfuse from plan9port and decided to give this feature a try cause this will eliminate the risks caused by write accesses from host and guest at the same time. Mack Wallace : Thank you for your advice. That should really be the way to share data between host and guest over qemu because it will be portable to my real needs after this testing setup. Like you I'm about to port an educational kiosk app realized with Freebsd and X11 to plan9 after the licence conditions changed. So I have to do a lot of coding and even while I loved some ideas of acme it wouldn't be the right choice for my students to work with acme on software projects. So I want to port my full developer environment to plan9 including a rio substitute and a forked scintilla Editor with syntax highlightning. To do that I need to exchange data between host and guest on a live base and u9fs as well as 9pfuse seem to do a better job regarding synchronization. The more I read the more I like the ideas how the kernel and drivers are implemented and  of course 9p as the connecting glue. I'll try your u9fs advice parallel to the 9pfuse approach and share those information as an how to for my students and will be happy to mention your advice as well. I think that 9pfuse will make my live easier cause of the authentification demands of freebsd. I'll try this and reply ... thanks. Skip Tavakkolian : I didn't know this command thanks for reminding. The device was already recognized and the subfolders raw as well as ctl were present only the partitions on the drive weren't recognized and this was caused by the tool I used to create the virtual harddisk. For all who are interested fdisk from plan9 (9legacy) has a small but strong bug. While editing the partition table and trying to reset the changes a system crash ocured. Conclusion : I'm really impressed about the fast and very good replies to my question. Thank you I'll keep you informed about how I did the communication between host and guest cause this is somewhat lacking in available documentation. Many developers will give plan9 after the licence change a try cause it is a real alternative to even BSD licenced open source projects.  To realize my kiosk setup with FreeBSD I have to supply an iso image for the last version with 1 GB while only using the kernel and xinit. The reasons are first of all the llvm infrastructure which has the largest size in the setup (320 MB and more) and X11 where the minimal setup requires 840 MB. By switching to plan 9 I estimate getting a working kiosk app  with a size of less than 128 MB while keeping the compiler suite and the protocols intact. Especially for people who need a general setup of computers in lessons this licence change opened up many possibilities. So a live exchange of data between developer systems during the modification time of userland software and windowing system is unavoidable. Thanks for your replies. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T267dbe605a36a2f5-Me7e86568d604d2c1428f0174 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription