Mounting HFS+ Drives on Ubuntu
As part of a little home server I’ve been building, I wanted to reuse some old mac hard drives I had laying around. Before reusing the drives, I was really curious to see what was on them.
In order to do this, I needed a way to mount the HFS+ formatted drives on Linux.
First thing was to install hfsprogs, this will let us read from the drive (Ubuntu can only read from non-journaled HFS drives).
sudo apt install hfsprogs
Next, find out what device the drive is attached to
sudo fdisk --list
Which will return something like this.
Disk /dev/sda: 149.1 GiB, 160041885696 bytes, 312581808 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: E55FCDF7-6658-4DEE-8478-33707537F42A
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2 4096 2101247 2097152 1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3 2101248 312578047 310476800 148G Linux filesystem
Disk /dev/sdb: 232.9 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A2D23874-863A-4F6E-AFB4-4F025A563528
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 40 409639 409600 200M EFI System
/dev/sdb2 409640 398847143 398437504 190G Apple HFS/HFS+
/dev/sdb3 399110144 488396799 89286656 42.6G Microsoft basic data
Looking at the type column, we can see an HFS/HFS+ drive attached to /dev/sdb2. It also appears that this drive has a bootcamp partition, cool!
From here on out, all the commands will reference my particular device on /dev/sdb2, but be sure to change it for the value you found.
Now let’s try and actually mount the drive. First by creating the mount point.
sudo mkdir /media/machd
Then, by mounting the drive
sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdb2 /media/machd
That’s it! With any luck, when you go to /media/machd you should see all the drives contents!
When you’re done, we can unmount the drive like this
sudo umount /media/machd
We can also check the status of the drive (it doesn’t need to be mounted for this).
sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdb2
Which returns something like:
** /dev/sdb2
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
...