mounting mac os Extended (journaled) file system on Suse 11

[mikew1368]

I have a 1.5 TB external drive that I have been using to back up my Macbook pro
(time machine app), and I formatted the entire drive to mac os extended. The laptop primarily communicates to my home network wireless to N-band router.

I recently built a server machine at home, which has suse 11 running. It connects
to N-band router via GB internet.

Question: Can I mount the external drive using USB 2.0 connection with that type of file system (Mac os extended)?

Optimally, I'd want to use 500 GB on the external drive to back up my laptop, and 1TB of it to back up my internal drives on the server. I recall having to format an external drive with fat32 so that both a windows system and mac os could view the files properly, but now I am working mostly with mac osx and linux systems.

[gogalthorp]

To my knowledge you can not access a HFS file system direct from Linux.

I found 1 link but it appears to be dead.

Filesystems HOWTO

[HROAdmin26]

Mounting HFS partition

From openSuSE 11.1:

grep MAC /boot/config-2.6.27.7-9-pae
CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION=y

From the mount manpage:

-t vfstype
The argument following the -t is used to indicate the file system type. The file system types which are currently supported include: adfs, affs, aut-
ofs, cifs, coda, coherent, cramfs, debugfs, devpts, efs, ext, ext2, ext3, hfs, hfsplus

And the utilities package appears to be called hfsutils in SuSE:

zypper se hfs

  | hfsutils | Tools Used for the Macintosh's Hierarchical File System | package

[mikew1368]

the wikipedia entry for hfs+ said journaled should only be readable to linux, but
but since the man page for mount lists hfsplus, I am going to try it (I'm a newbie at linux admin stuff, so I still need to learn how to issue mount command).

I downloaded and installed the HFSUTILS package, but I think I just need to do
the normal 'mount' command. the hfsutils package seem to be tools to manipulate an HFS partitioned volume from a unix system. Not sure I need to do this.

[mikew1368]

The drive is plugged into a usb port and powered up.
I did the following mount command as root, but the message seems to indicate
that the drive is not hfsplus (which I read means mac os extended journaled).


mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive1 -t hfsplus
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

[HROAdmin26]

Did you look at fdisk? What says that you should be mounting sdaONE? From the previous link about mounting HFS:

Note that the USB stick has created sda1 through sda9, and it is
accessible through sda9 !

Did you confirm that MAC option is compiled into your kernel?

Did you look at /var/log/messages?

[mikew1368]

when I grep for Mac in /boot/config-2.6.27.29-0.1-default,
I do see
CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION=y

I looked at /etc/fstab to see what was being auto-mounted, and
df to notice that my internal IDE drives are mounted on /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sdd2
(I thought these are usually mounted on /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2)

I rebooted and tried the same mount command and looked at the difference in output
of 'dmesg', and I only find the single line

hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock

I will look at man pages for fdisk (partition table manipulator for linux), but it seems this
command is used to partition a disk, and I already have the disk partitioned.

[gogalthorp]

Just issue a

fdisk -l

this will list all disks and partitions

Possible there is a small unused partition on the drive??

[mikew1368]

linux-rqt0:/home/Mike # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 48 385528+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 49 65 136552+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 66 30378 243481141 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 30378 30401 192779 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 48 385528+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 49 65 136552+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3 66 30378 243481141 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 30378 30401 192779 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0003ce57

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 9324 74894998+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 9325 9726 3229065 5 Extended
/dev/sdc5 9325 9726 3229033+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdd: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00082772

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 2611 20972826 83 Linux
/dev/sdd2 2612 9726 57151237+ 83 Linux

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sde'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sde: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 182402 1465138583+ ee GPT

[HROAdmin26]

Disk /dev/sde: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 182402 1465138583+ ee GPT

Notice that /dev/sde is the 1.5TB drive.