PPC: Remount Mac Partitions in Write Mode

Support knowledgebase (macpartitionen_mounten)
Applies to

SuSE Linux: Versions 6.4 to 7.1
This article refers to an older version of SuSE Linux. Therefore some of the informations given in this article may be outdated or the article may contain stale links.

Symptom:

You have used YaST2 for the installation and all available Mac partitions can be mounted with the corresponding icons on your KDE desktop.
However, you cannot write any files to that partition; on the other hand, reading files from that partition works fine.

Cause:

Due to security reasons, the partition is mounted in read-only mode.
No HFS partitions have been entered into the file /etc/fstab since SuSE Linux 7.3 because the kernel driver is not stable enough.

Solution:

A temporary workaround to copy files to your HFS partition would be the following: remount rw /mountpoint

/mountpoint is the mountpoint where your HFS partition is mounted in the Linux directory structure. It will change the mode of /mountpoint to read-write.

If you prefer a permanent read-write mode, change the entries in the file /etc/fstab .
Open the file with any editor of your choice (you need root permissions to write that file). Search for lines similar to these:

/dev/hda9       /mac/linuxboot  hfs     ro,noauto,user  0 0
/dev/hda10      /mac/exchange   hfs     ro,noauto,user  0 0

The entry ro is the mount mode, is means read-only. Change it to rw to mount it in read-write mode after the next reboot.

Keep in mind that the kernel HFS driver is not stable, it will crash on a SMP system.
There is a package called hfsutils.rpm that is much safer to use for data transfer.
Example (you need root permissions):

su -
hmount /dev/hda10
hls -l
hcopy /home/user/picture.jpg :
hcopy -t :template.txt ~user/KDesktop/template.txt
humount
chown user ~user/KDesktop/template.txt
exit


Keywords: MAC, PPC, POWERPC, APPLE, MOUNT, PARTITION

SDB-macpartitionen_mounten, Copyright SuSE Linux AG, Nürnberg, Germany - Version: 03. Dez 2001
SuSE Linux AG - Last generated: 20. Feb 2002 by olh (sdb_gen 1.40.0)