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I plugged in my external harddrive (which was formatted on my Mac into HFS+ journaled) to my Ubuntu desktop 9.04 64bit. I am not able to get the drive to mount with write capability, how do I do that? Right now all I'm getting is read access, I tried
sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdf2 /media/"Portable HD"
but that still gave me only read access... ideas??
GiH
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 3 667
78
You need to turn off the journaling if you want to write to it from Ubuntu. Ubuntu only has support for writing to non-journaled HFS+ volumes.
On your Mac:
Disabling journaling from HFS+ is still possible up to OS X Yosemite 10.10
John T
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 149 037
Why should someone use a proprietary solution (i.e Mac OS) to write an USB? This shouldn't be marked as the solution, the unproprietary solution provided by @Digiground is way better. – Denys Vitali – 2016-03-03T07:29:09.680
5
Do note that "Disabling journaling on your main OS X partition is not recommended however as journaling is an important feature of any filesystem that can prevent damage and data loss" (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/hfsplus)
– Hay – 2010-11-06T13:00:24.957@Hay you can re-enable journaling. All it does is help the system recover faster in such an event (ie. abnormal shutdown). Not the end of the world. – John T – 2010-11-06T16:15:16.767
12No, that's not all journaling does. It also helps prevent filesystem corruption, which could be serious enough to only be fixable with a reformat. – Wade Williams – 2011-04-27T04:26:47.860
8in macos 10.6.8, in step 3, open the file menu with "option+alt" pressed – commonpike – 2012-06-10T17:29:35.990
2@JohnT Could you please provide a source for the fact that "Ubuntu only has support for writing to non-journaled HFS+ volumes" please? I'm doing some research on HFS+ and it would be very useful. Thank you. – kalaracey – 2013-01-13T03:37:50.057
Just to cite the reference here: the current Linux hfsplus documentation describes the "force" options as: "Used to force write access to volumes that are marked as journalled or locked. Use at your own risk."
– ckujau – 2014-02-07T12:23:39.547For what it's worth: I just disabled journalling on a HFS+ volume on OSX 10.9.1, they either re-instated it or holding the option key still works. – Marlies – 2014-03-22T17:13:01.307
196
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/sdx# /media/mntpoint
or
sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /dev/sdx# /mount/point
Finally, if the drive was improperly unmounted or has otherwise become partially corrupted run fsck.hfsplus (provided here by Jayson) as such:
sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdx#
Digiground
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 1 961
This is answer is wrong, as it does not hint on disabling Journaling. -o force does not override this. – rurban – 2015-03-05T12:31:15.113
1in fstab: UUID=YOUR-12345-UID /media/MountPoint hfsplus defaults,force 0 0 – Leonardo – 2015-10-23T00:29:42.590
1If the disk has a problem, it will stubbornly only mount read-only. Verify/repair disk in OSX using Disk Utility as fsck.hfplus won't run "because it's a journalled file system". – Greg Bell – 2015-12-03T00:04:43.847
1using this code I get the following error: `mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb2, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so.` Any ideas what the problem may be? I am trying this with a SSD, if this is relevant.
– McLawrence – 2017-05-30T16:10:39.4101On 16.04 this answer worked but I had to use apt install hfsplus not hfsprogs – AlanObject – 2017-11-02T18:21:54.850
After running these commands, my drive no longer mounts in OSX. Why might this happen? – jonathanking – 2018-04-10T17:07:34.807
1@McLawrence were you able to mount your SSD with rw permission ? – SudarP – 2019-01-26T00:59:30.030
7Thank you very much for providing a Linux only solution! ^_^ – FCTW – 2012-05-31T20:22:00.807
this doesn't work for me, still complains of being read-only. Wikipedia suggests forcing rw mode risks corruption and the only way is to disable journalling on Mac side before mounting under Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Linux which sounds plausible to me
– Anentropic – 2012-06-28T06:54:13.003For those on arch: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=6709&comments=all
– slf – 2012-09-12T02:21:39.61014I'm on Ubuntu 12.04, the remount command should be like this sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /dev/sdx# /mount/point. Then must use root to read/write data. – Coc – 2012-09-15T10:31:03.257
@Anentropic they were only found to corrupt drives >=2TB, which isn't a problem for me – slf – 2013-03-28T01:22:11.590
20Why is this not marked as the answer? – Jonathan H – 2013-06-08T09:15:52.060
I'm on Fedora 19, and the remount command is same as the one in comment from @Coc above. Thanks! – mkelley33 – 2013-10-12T21:01:32.800
4@Digiground and @Coc both fail with mount: warning: /media/mount/point seems to be mounted read-only. on Ubuntu 13.04 with hfsprogs installed. – here – 2013-12-24T04:56:35.843
27
You can enable writing to HFS+ in Linux even if you didn't disable journaling. In addition to hfsplus which you already have, you need to have hfsprogs installed:
sudo apt-get install hfsprogs
Then, use the -o force option:
sudo mount -o force /dev/sdX /your/mount/point
If the drive has been mounted automatically (as it should be on a desktop system like Ubuntu), you can enable write with
sudo mount -o remount,rw,force /mount/point
or
sudo mount -o remount,rw,force /dev/sdx
/mount/point would usually be /media/Your_drive_label /dev/sdx is your HFS+ device
Use mount -l to find which device is already mounted on which mount point.
mivk
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 2 270
Does this need disabling journaling? – Makmeksam – 2019-12-16T06:08:34.127
1from the answer of Digiground, do you not miss the rw part in the command?? I succeeded with his options. – meduz – 2012-01-26T12:44:34.147
@meduz: I did not need "rw" in Ubuntu 10.04. I seem to need it now in 12.04. So I have edited the reply to add it. – mivk – 2012-08-14T06:48:50.110
14
Have you tried to match permissions?
By default, Mac OS X formats volumes in journaled HFS+ volumes. Journaling is a feature that improves data reliability, and unfortunately it makes HFS drives read-only in Linux.
To disable journaling, just boot into OS X and fire up Disk Utility. Click on your HFS partition, hold the Option key, and click File in the menu bar. A new option to Disable Journaling will come up in the menu. Click that, and reboot into Linux. You should have read and write access to your HFS partition—however, the permissions on your Mac user's home folder will prevent you from reading or writing those files. we just need to change our UID in one OS so that it matches the UID in the other. Unless you have a reason for choosing otherwise, we're going to change our Linux UID to match our OS X one, since it's a bit easier. By default, the first user in OS X has a UID of 501, but you can double check this by going into System Preferences in OS X, right-clicking on your user, and hitting Advanced Options. If your User ID is something different from 501, replace 501 with your other UID in the terminal commands below.
Boot into Linux (we're using Ubuntu in this example) and fire up the Terminal. First, we're going to add a temporary user, since we don't want to edit a user that we're currently logged into. So, run the following commands in the Terminal, hitting Enter after each one:
sudo useradd -d /home/tempuser -m -s /bin/bash -G admin tempuser
sudo passwd tempuser
Type in a new password for the temporary user when prompted. Reboot and log in as tempuser. Then, open up the Terminal and type in the following commands, once again hitting enter after each one (and replacing yourusername with your Linux user's username):
sudo usermod --uid 501 yourusername
sudo chown -R 501:yourusername /home/yourusername
This will change your Linux user's UID to 501 and fix your home folder permissions so that you still own them. Now, you should be able to read and write to both your Mac and Linux user's home folder, no matter what OS you're logged into.
You may also want to fix your login screen, since by default Ubuntu won't list users with a UID of less than 1000. To do this, just open a Terminal and run gksudo gedit /etc/login.defs and search for UID_MIN in the text file. Change that value from 1000 to 501, and when you reboot your user will be listed in the login screen.
Steve Alfano
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 141
1great solution! you've just saved me a few hours :) the only thing to add is delete the tempuser --> sudo userdel tempuser – Feida Kila – 2011-10-31T23:12:42.087
2
Just in case this helps anyone in the future - if you're not even able to get the drive to mount in Read-Only mode, it might be because the drive uses Apple Core Storage, which is a wrapper around HFS+. See here:
villasenor
Posted 2009-12-17T07:16:17.487
Reputation: 81
I feel like the answers to this question are far better, easier, and safer than the answers provided here.
– Mike Williamson – 2019-05-31T18:04:33.167