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weberc2
Asked: 2012-02-01 03:28:03 +0800 CST

How to mount HFS+ drive and ignore permissions

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I installed Ubuntu and Windows on my MacBook and Ubuntu is my primary OS; however, all of my media stays on my OSX partition. I want to be able to access it (at least my OSX user's home folder) from Ubuntu without having to launch a media player (or anything else) as root. Also, because I occasionally want to fire up my machine in OSX, I don't want to change anything that I would need to change back frequently (I read a lot about changing UID--I don't exactly understand what this entails, but I wouldn't want to have to change my UID back and forth depending on which OS I'm using. Similarly, I don't want to change file system permissions back and forth).

Also, I saw something about a "noowner" option, but that doesn't seem to do what I want it to.

So I guess I'd like to be able to do something like this:

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o noowner /dev/sda2/ /media/Mac

And then be able to access all of my media (at least everything in my OSX user's Home folder) without dropping in as root. (for clarity: the above command line entry doesn't do what I want it to do, but I want to be able to do something similar).

Or would it be better to change my UID? And if so, how?

filesystem permissions mount macosx hfs+

6 Answers

  1. bindfs is the answer. It will take an already mounted file system and provide a view of it with whichever uid you'd like:

    sudo apt-get install bindfs
mkdir ~/myUIDdiskFoo
sudo bindfs -u $(id -u) -g $(id -g) /media/diskFoo ~/myUIDdiskFoo
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  2. Best Answer

    I wasn't able to figure out how to ignore the permissions, but I ended up changing the UID on my Ubuntu account to match my OSX account:

    sudo useradd -d /home/tempuser -m -s /bin/bash -G admin tempuser
sudo passwd tempuser

    Enter new password. Log out, log in as "other" with username "tempuser" and the password you chose earlier. Open a terminal and type:

    sudo usermod --uid 501 yourusername
sudo chown -R 501:yourusername /home/yourusername

    *change "yourusername" to your non-temporary user name and 501 to the UID of your Mac account (first Mac account starts at 501, but subsequent users will have different UIDs).

    Log out of tempuser and log back into your normal account (this is important; don't just switch users--bad things happen). Open a terminal window and type:

    sudo userdel -r tempuser

    For more details, visit this page.

    Caveats

    • Only one linux user can gain access. This setup will not allow multiple linux users to access multiple user directories on the HFS+ drive. This is because Apple locks down user directories (and media directories like Music) to 700 (rwx------).
    • Once you change your UID the login manager will stop listing that user. You have to change the UID_MIN option in /etc/login.def from 1000 to 500.
    • Finally because the user UID has changed, access to the drive becomes a permissions confusion. You will have to note the exact location of your user's home folder to view it. Tab completions and browsing through the file manager will become problematic to folders outside the original Apple user's home folder without sudo.
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  3. The documentation for the linux kernel implementation of the HFS+ filesystem lists a uid mount option that allows you to "own" all files (and maybe some other options that might be useful too).

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  4. I know this is old, but there is another way around it that seems to work just fine for me. Since all of the files were owned by a "root" user, all I did was issue su root from the terminal and ls -lah /media/Macintosh HD from there. By using root, I was able to bypass the permission denied error.

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  5. This is general option I am using works perfectly

    mkdir /media/test
mkdir /media/diskhfs
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/test -o rw
bindfs -o perms=775,mirror=userorid --map=99/userorid:@99/@uderorid /media/test /media/diskhfs
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  6. I was able to get access to files from an old Macbook hard drive by running the file manager with elevated privileges.

    gksudo thunar

    Then copy files as needed.

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