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oppochips
Asked: 2013-08-14 17:40:48 +0800 CST

How to read and write HFS+ journaled external HDD in Ubuntu without access to OS X?

  • 772

I have a HFS+ journaled external hard-drive and need to be able to write to it on Ubuntu. I don't have access to my Mac, it's thousands of miles away and I won't have access to it for three months.

Can anything be done without losing the data on the HDD?

mount

5 Answers

  1. See How to mount a HFS partition in Ubuntu as Read/Write? - Super User

    To quote from the second/third answer down:

    First, make sure that you have hfsprogs installed. Example installation command:

    sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

    Next, mount or remount the HFS+ drive; commands need to be as follows:

    sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdXY /media/mntpoint

    or

    sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /mount/point

    ...

    Finally, if the drive was improperly unmounted or has otherwise become partially corrupted run fsck.hfsplus ... as such:

    sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdXY

    There is a goldmine of other information there regarding the mounting of HFS+ filesystems.

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  2. These steps works for me (Ubuntu Studio 14.04):

    sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

    Check status of drive:

    sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdXY

    Unmount deivce:

    sudo umount /media/sebastian/devicename

    (create folder to mount the drive)

    Mount the drive with HFS+ read/write permissions:

    sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdXY /home/sebastian/foldername
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  3. I had this problem too. I tried fsck.hfsplus, umount, remount with sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw nothing worked for me.

    What did work for me was :

    1. unmount with sudo umount /media/myMountPoint
    2. delete the mount point with sudo rmdir
    3. recreate the mount point with sudo mkdir and
    4. remount with sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/xxxx /media/myMountPoint

    Hope this will also work for you guys.

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  4. Since I cannot comment (not enough reputation here:). I will post this answer to point out that the answer above appears to be for a hfs+ HD that is not journalled. The 'fsck.hfsplus' command needs to be issued with the '-f' option to work on a journalled volume. To avoid confusion I've copied the command below:

    $ sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdXY

** /dev/sdXY
[snip....]
** The volume ########### appears to be OK.

    This would only run on a volume that has not been journalled. Even with the '-f' option on a journalled volume this check in itself will not allow the remounted volume to be mounted read/write. I believe journalling must be turned off.

    There does not seem to be stable code available to turn off journalling from linux. See the link provided by Richard: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1420673

    If journalling is turned off and the disk initially mounts as read-only unmounting and remounting should allow read/write if the disk is undamaged. If it is damaged then fsck.hfsplus needs to be run.

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  5. Borrowing from the previous answer, the following steps worked for me. Hopefully this is useful to others:

    1. Plug in the external HDD.

    2. Notice that Ubuntu mounts it automatically but it is read-only.

    3. Unmount the drive (I do this simply by clicking on the eject button in the file explorer).

    4. sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

    5. $ sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdXY 

** /dev/sdXY
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
** Checking multi-linked files.
** Checking Catalog hierarchy.
** Checking Extended Attributes file.
** Checking volume bitmap.
** Checking volume information.
** The volume ########### appears to be OK.

      (sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdXY if filesystem is journaled.)

    6. Remount the drive (I do this simply by clicking on the drive in the file explorer).

    7. The drive is now read-write.

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