HFSPlus Question

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In CentOS 7.2.1511 does the 3.10.0-327.18.2.el7.CentOS.plus.x86_64 (Plus)
kernel read HFSPlus iMac drives? I don’t see any hfsplus modules installed anywhere, so I suspect not. My sister’s 17″ iMac died, and I’m trying to recover the drive. If it spins up, I’d like to copy it with dd.

I see that Elrepo has kmod-hfsplus and hfsplus-tools, will these work with the Plus kernel?

I still have to pull the drive from that infernal iMac case, so can’t test yet.

Thank you for any clues, my Google-foo isn’t finding anything on the Plus kernel and HFSPlus.

7 thoughts on - HFSPlus Question

  • For what it’s worth a non-ancient Mac can boot to Internet recovery by holding the Command and R keys while powering on. From there you can get a working Terminal (click the Utilities menu at the top of the screen) and run dd or try copying files to another drive, or whatever else you may want to try.

  • It’s in mainline so I don’t know why it would not be built. It certainly exists on Fedora. You could get Fedora live image, dd to a USB stick and it will boot the Mac.

    The much bigger problem is recent OS X versions default to, and convert on updating prior versions to, Core Storage volumes. This is Apple’s equivalent of LVM. And there is no open source code for this. Upstream liblkid doesn’t even recognize it. It’s actually a big problem as it renders OS X HFS unreadable outside of OS X.

    Microsoft’s equivalent is Storage Spaces. But as yet it’s not used by default. Likewise no support on Linux still.

    Chris Murphy

    My sister’s 17″ iMac died, and I’m trying to

  • There are a lot of modules in the equivalent mainline kernel that are not enabled / built in the RHEL kernel, reason being RH don’t want the extra workload of maintaining (backporting fixes) those drivers for the
    10 year lifespan of the product, long after upstream support at kernel.org has ended.

    In this case they probably determined it unlikely that a user would want to hook an HFSPlus volume up to a RHEL server. They also disabled a whole bunch of 100Mbit ethernet drivers commonly found on older desktop motherboards in RHEL7 for the same reason.

  • Fedora 24
    [root@f24m mnt]# grep HFSPLUS /boot/config-4.5.6-300.fc24.x86_64
    CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS=m
    # CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS_POSIX_ACL is not set

    CentOS 7
    [root@localhost ~]# grep HFSPLUS /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7.x86_64
    # CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS is not set

    [root@localhost ~]# grep HFSPLUS /boot/config-4.6.1-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64
    CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS=m
    # CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS_POSIX_ACL is not set

    So it looks like it’s not created in the CentOS kernels, but is in the elrepo and Fedora kernels.

  • Thanks for the clues from yourself and other’s. I haven’t had a chance to check things out yet, I’m still dealing with food poisoning I came down with after sending my question. :-(

    Maybe later this week.

    Al

  • Use the ELrepo kmod-hfsplus module. See elrepo.org for details on how to get the repo installed, then you can just ‘yum install kmod-hfsplus’
    to get started. Use the ELrepo mailing lists for questions abut ELrepo and the kmod-hfsplus package.

    ++++++++++++
    [lowen@dhcp-pool108 ~]$ repoquery -qi kmod-hfsplus

    Name : kmod-hfsplus Version : 0.0
    Release : 2.el7.elrepo Architecture: x86_64
    Size : 179840
    Packager : Alan Bartlett
    Group : System Environment/Kernel URL : http://www.kernel.org/
    Repository : elrepo Summary : hfsplus kernel module(s)
    Source : hfsplus-kmod-0.0-2.el7.elrepo.src.rpm Description :
    This package provides the hfsplus kernel module(s) which allows the mounting of extended format Macintosh-formatted hard drive partitions with full read-write access. The file system is often called HFS+ and was introduced with MacOS 8. It includes all Macintosh specific filesystem data such as data forks & creator codes and it also has several UNIX style features such as file ownership and permissions. It has been built for the Linux kernel using the x86_64 family of processors.
    [lowen@dhcp-pool108 ~]$
    ++++++++++++++++