This past week I had to take a backup of one of my servers, but the only drive I had laying around with HFS+ formatted (Mac OSX). After fiddling around in Knoppix and going through a bunch of Google search results, I think I finally found the right combination of tools and commands to get the HFS+ formatted drive to show up under Knoppix as both read and write.

First, you'll want to make sure you get hfsprogs installed. As mentioned, I was in a Knoppix live environment, so using the following command worked for me:

root@Microknoppix:/# apt-get install hfsprogs

Now with this utility installed you should be able to mount your drive:

root@Microknoppix:/# mkdir /mnt/drive
root@Microknoppix:/# mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdXY /media/mntpoint
root@Microknoppix:/# cd /mnt/drive

Now it may also be possible to use this command if you previously tried mounting the drive without having hfsprogs installed. Without hfsprogs it can likely still mount the drive but it will be mounted as read-only.

root@Microknoppix:/# mkdir /mnt/drive
root@Microknoppix:/# mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /mount/point
root@Microknoppix:/# cd /mnt/drive

In any event, your HFS+ drive should now be mounted as read and write! 👍

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