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Mounting Mac HFS Partitions

There are many great reasons to mount one of your MacOS HFS partitions in Linux. It's the fastest way to transfer files back and forth between the two operating systems.

Unfortunately, it takes a little planning ahead because currently, there is no way to mount HFS+ partitions.

When preparing my drive for Linux, I make an extra HFS partition. While the new graphic installer no longer requires you to partition and format with pdisk, below is the partition table of my hard disk:

Number 7 is my main MacOS HFS+ partition. Number 8 is the MacOS HFS partition that I want to share with LinuxPPC.

I have tried to mount partition 8 from the graphic installer, but have never been successful. So after installing LinuxPPC, these are the steps I take under KDE.

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Open the text file /etc/fstab. Below is a copy of mine. The third line allows the Mac HFS partition to mount.

It tells Linux, "Take the eighth partition on device hda and link it to the directory /mnt/mac". If you want the partition to always mount at boot, use the 'defaults' option. If you would rather mount it manually, use noauto. (Thanks Jolin Warren).

Next, you need to create the folder called mac inside the folder mnt.

At this point, after restarting Linux, you can go to directory /mnt/mac and see your Mac HFS partition, but we're use to seeing this represented as a disk icon on the desktop, so let's go one step further.

On your KDE desktop is a folder called Templates (shown below). Open the folder and drag the device icon to the desktop, making a copy.

Click on it with the third mouse button (or option-three-click) and select Properties from the contextual menu.

Below is the Properties window for a device icon. We can modify these settings to make a "hard disk icon" on the desktop. Remember, it's not really a hard disk icon, but I've got news for you, the one on you MacOS desktop is really no different!

The settings below are copies from the fstab file.

The cool thing is that you can select differing icons for when the drive is mounted. In our case, we will always see the mounted icon because our fstab file has an automount setting of default.

You can do the same thing for your CD ROM. Create a device icon from the Template folder and change the Properties to match the fstab file.

Julien Neuschwander asks: