[NCLUG] dead drive

[Chris Riddoch]

mike cullerton <michaelc at cullerton.com> writes:

> hey folks,
> 
>   got a drive that won't mount. it's hfs+ on a macos x box. fsck says
>   "Invalid node structure" and aborts. i don't even know what that
>   means.

Well, one of my friends coincidentally just had to pull a bunch of
stuff off a Mac last week. He ended up looking around for HFS+
filesystem support for linux, and couldn't find any. He ended up using
'dd' and schlourping the entire drive into one massive file in the
hope that someone will eventually write support for that filesystem.

I think I've found some options, though.

>   any ideas to try? do i have any chance of getting data off the drive?

Looks like there's nothing in the kernel, but there *is* a program
called hfsplus, and a sourceforge project for making an hfsplus
driver:

http://packages.debian.org/testing/otherosfs/hfsplus.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-hfsplus/

Someone commented last month on the sourceforge site:

> New patch available against the 2.4.18 kernel. Haven't had any
> stability problems, and runs pretty well on small drives, and
> reliable but somewhat slow on very large drives. Note that any hard
> links created in OSX will show up without their data, as they are
> handled in a somewhat strange fashion...

Release notes:

> Release Name: hfsplus 0.2
> 
> Notes: Reliable reading of metadata and file forks, if somewhat slow
> on a volume with many files. No support for anything other than
> read-only, and no resource fork

Download it here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/linux-hfsplus/hfsplus-patch-20020606?download

-- 
Chris Riddoch       | epistemological
socket at peakpeak.com | humility