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How to mount an HFSPLUS partition in Linux

This entry was posted on May 14 2012

Update: I and others have found hfsplus support has been unreliable on Linux so I have converted the drive to EXT4. Read this post’s comments for more.

I recently purchased a 2TB external drive for my Linux media centre but could not work out why I couldn’t write to the drive regardless of the permissions I had set.

When mounting the drive I would get the following error:

mount: warning: /media/drive seems to be mounted read-only.

This is the solution I found thanks to a collection of findings on the web by firstly installing hfsprogs:

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs // For Debian based distro
sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdb2 // depending on your device and partition

Then try mounting the drive again as a normal user and hopefully it will work.


Linux


2 Responses to “How to mount an HFSPLUS partition in Linux”

  1. By Chris on Sep 16, 2012 | Reply

    Not sure how or why but this totally worked! I tried a number of different iterations of the following command:

    sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdc2 /media/macos

    but it only worked once I did the fsck command above.


  2. By Damien on Sep 19, 2012 | Reply

    Since my blog post I have found that this solution is a little unreliable. Sometimes the filesystem becomes read-only for no reason. I have had to reboot and repeat the command to get it working again.

    I have formatted the drive as EXT4 and it’s been fine since.

    Thanks for your feedback.


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