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

Question

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?

Answer 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.

Answer 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 device:

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

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 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.