Question: I realise that this question is similar in nature to this question, but I’m hoping to specifically bring more attention to an additional problem in one of the comments of this answer to that question.
I’ve taken out the hard drive of an old MacbookPro and I’m trying to mount it on my Elementary OS box, where it automatically mounts it as read-only. I want to gain r-w access to this drive.
Following the procedure as given in the answer linked to above, after running
sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /dev/sdc2 /media/myharddrive
I get
mount: warning: /media/myharddrive seems to be mounted read-only.
This has been noted by a comment on that question, but hasn’t gained enough attention to reward an answer. How come it’s still read-only? Isn’t that what force ensures?
The following may or may not be relevant:
I also ran sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdc2 following the blog post linked to in the answer and added the -f flag after fsck didn’t want to perform a check of a journaled system. this ran nicely up until
** /dev/sdc2** Checking HFS Plus volume.** Checking Extents Overflow file.** Checking Catalog file.** Checking multi-linked files. ?Orphaned indirect node iNode28863935** Checking Catalog hierarchy.** Checking Extended Attributes file.** Checking volume bitmap.** Checking volume information.** Repairing volume.** Rechecking volume.** 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 myharddrive was repaired successfully.*** glibc detected *** fsck.hfsplus: munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer: 0x00000000022f9e30 ***
followed by a backtrace and a memory map. The fsck call appears to have had no effect on my drive, neither good nor bad.
Any pointers on how to get read-write access to my drive, without booting OSX, would be greatly appreciated.
EDITMichael Kj?rling’s comments and answer solved my fundamental issue of accessing my data. However, the questions in bold above haven’t been addressed yet, so I’ve edited the question to emphasise this issue, leaving the question open for future users.
Answer: As we found out in the comments, there are two possible problems at hand here:
Putting these two together, you should be able to copy your files using a command like sudo cp -av /media/myharddrive /somewhere/else, where /somewhere/else exists and is writable.
The -v parameter isn’t strictly needed, but after half an hour or an hour of just waiting, you might appreciate the files being listed as they are being copied. Note that if you have a very large number of small files, the screen refreshes may reduce the throughput of the copying; in that case, simply minimize the window and check on it occasionally.
-a tells cp to operate in “archive” mode, preserving as much as possible about the files it is copying, including subdirectories. Or you could use -r to tell it to only preserve the directory structure.
Using this, you should be able to copy the files to a more suitable location where you can work with them more freely, without being restricted by the read-only limitation of HFS+ file system support.