Hi all,

Sorry if this is on the wrong ng, but I have an old P133 PC which runs
Red Hat 7. I also had an Apple Macintosh PowerBook 3400 which has
died. When it worked, it ran Mac OS 8.6 which uses Apple's HFS+
filesystem.

I don't plan on replacing the Apple, but I would like to get some of
the data off its hard drive. I know linux has some HFS support, and
have used it to read Mac formatted floppy disks (mount -t hfs ..etc,
etc), but does anyone know if this will work should I plug the hard
drive into my PC's IDE bus and try mounting it? My main concern is
whether linux can read HFS+ (as opposed to plain old HFS) properly,
and whether the PC will correctly detect and identify the hard drive.

I can't just try it as yet, as I need to get a 2.5"->3.5" hard drive
adaptor first, but dont want to go through the effort of aquiring one
unlerss I know there's a reasonable chance of this working.

Cheers,
Adam.

root@127.0.0.1 writes:

There is a HFS+ module in quite recent versions of the kernel (after
2.4.20 at the least). I must admit I have not checked if it has made
it into the main tree. On an iBook I have 2.4.22 with BenH patches,
but my impression is that the HFS+ file system support is standard.
In 2.4.22 with the BenH patches I find the following information in
the file system section (using make xconfig and cutting and pasting).
It certainly works, though I only use a scratch partition to
read/write to as the module is listed as experimental.

CONFIG_HFSPLUS_FS:

If you say Y here, you will be able to mount extended format
Macintosh-formatted hard drive partitions with full read-write access.

This file system is often called HFS+ and was introduced with
MacOS 8. It includes all Mac specific filesystem data such as
data forks and creator codes, but it also has several UNIX
style features such as file ownership and permissions.

This file system is also available as a module ( = code which can
be inserted in and removed from the running kernel whenever you
want). The module is called hfsplus.o. If you want to compile it
as a module, say M here and read Documentation/modules.txt.


--
Stephen Harker Stephen.Harker@spme.monash.edu.au
School of Physics & Materials Engineering
Monash University http://www.ph.adfa.edu.au/s-harker/
Baloney Baffles brains: Eric Frank Russell