HFS+ on Linux

My MacBook Pro seems to have died. Its hard disk holds lots of data that have not been backed up anywhere else. The important data have been mostly backed up but latest changes haven’t been backed up. Other than that, I had to check the hard disk for bad sectors etc and since I don’t have another Mac to test it on I had to do it on my Fedora box. My system (Fedora 15) would automatically detect and mount the HFS+ hard disk on read only mode. It was also missing the fsck tool for HFS+ partitions. Getting the fsck tool for HFS+ required downloading and installing hfsplus-tools via yum.However, fsck.hfs will not allow you, except if you use the –force option, to scan the partition if it has journalling on, which is the case with HFS+ partitions by default.

But how would I turn off journalling when I don’t have a Mac system to attach my disk on? After a couple of minutes I came across a post on the Ubuntu forum which linked to this blog. The author has a C code that turns journalling off. A fixed version of this code can be found here. The compiled code results in an executable which gets as its only argument the partition that you want to get journalling off.

# gcc journalling_off.c -o journalling_off
# ./journalling_off /dev/sdg2

Next step was to perform the fsck check on the target disk

# fsck.hfs /dev/sdg2
** /dev/sdg2
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
** 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 OS X appears to be OK.

Disk looks OK. Next step is to mount it with read-write permissions:

# mount -t hfplus -o rw,user /dev/sdg2 /mnt/osx

Next issue encountered was the different UIDs between my account on the OS X system and that on the Linux system. Therefore, next step was to change the UIDs under the whole user directory on the OS X disk so I could access without problem with write permissions from my Linux box:

# find panoskrt/ -uid 501 -exec chown panoskrt {} \;