Springy Development

Mounting Mac OS X harddrives on Linux

Posted on November 10th, 2009 in Linux

I had to transfer some of my video files across from my harddrive onto my new HTPC, but XBMC would not mount the harddrive. So I had to mount the drive myself.

Heres how, first I installed the hfsplus via apt:

sudo apt-get install hfsplus hfsprogs hfsutils

This is so Linux can read the filesystem on the harddrive.

Now, to find out which drive is our harddrive we need to use a utility called parted, this will show us all the drives attached and their partitions. You have to be a superuser to use parted.

Start up parted:

sudo parted

Now print a list of all the drive:

print all

Here is the output for the harddrive I wish to mount:

Model: WD 10EACS External (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 20.5kB 210MB 210MB fat32 EFI System Partition boot
2 210MB 1000GB 1000GB hfsx Untitled

The output tells us where the disk is: /dev/sdc and the number of partitions.

I want to mount the second partition as thats the one with all my data on it, to mount the second partition you add a 2 to the end of /dev/sdc to say you want the second partition:

sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdc2 /mnt

Now the drive is mounted, all the files on the drive will be available in /mnt.