HFS+ access: Permission Denied for user's folders

[spongebue]

Hi all,

My girlfriend's Mac's hard drive recently died, and I'm trying to do a recovery with knoppix. I put the bad hard drive in a USB enclosure, but it caused things to choke up a little when I tried to read it under OS X. Instead, I tried it under knoppix. I was able to get the drive mounted relatively easily, though I had to run a few extra steps because it's an hfs+ drive. Now, I can navigate through most of the drive with no problem at all, as if it were a new drive (no choking anywhere like under OS X).

The one exception is, unfortunately, the most crucial area: the home directory (or rather, OS X's equivalent of that). This OS keeps it in the /Users/username directory, with the Documents, Music, Pictures, and what have you. The problem with that is, all of those folders are locked down, presumably because the user and password information are needed for those folders. Trying to cd into one of those directories gets me a "Permission Denied" error. Right now, the permissions are set to rwx------, and a sudo chmod 777 foldername just says "Read-only file system" and that doesn't work. I've googled for an hour, and just can't find anything that's helping me out. Does anyone know how to conquer this? There is no password to the account (yeah yeah, I know...) but I don't know how to unlock those folders with that blank password..

Any help is greatly appreciated, of course. If you have any questions, I'm putting a reply notification on this thread and will probably get back to you pretty quickly.

Thanks!
-Brian

[hal8000]

Hi all,

My girlfriend's Mac's hard drive recently died, and I'm trying to do a recovery with knoppix. I put the bad hard drive in a USB enclosure, but it caused things to choke up a little when I tried to read it under OS X. Instead, I tried it under knoppix. I was able to get the drive mounted relatively easily, though I had to run a few extra steps because it's an hfs+ drive. Now, I can navigate through most of the drive with no problem at all, as if it were a new drive (no choking anywhere like under OS X).

The one exception is, unfortunately, the most crucial area: the home directory (or rather, OS X's equivalent of that). This OS keeps it in the /Users/username directory, with the Documents, Music, Pictures, and what have you. The problem with that is, all of those folders are locked down, presumably because the user and password information are needed for those folders. Trying to cd into one of those directories gets me a "Permission Denied" error. Right now, the permissions are set to rwx------, and a sudo chmod 777 foldername just says "Read-only file system" and that doesn't work. I've googled for an hour, and just can't find anything that's helping me out. Does anyone know how to conquer this? There is no password to the account (yeah yeah, I know...) but I don't know how to unlock those folders with that blank password..

Any help is greatly appreciated, of course. If you have any questions, I'm putting a reply notification on this thread and will probably get back to you pretty quickly.

Thanks!
-Brian

At the moment write support for hfs+ is experimental under linux, similar to when NTFS was realeased for windows.
I would first check that the hfsplus module has been loaded

sudo modprobe hfsplus

Then you need to know where your MAC volume is, again as su or sudo

fdisk -l

(thats "l" as in "list" will list all partitions.

You can try and manually mount the mac partition with

mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdax /home/knoppix/mac

you need to replace sdax with the mac partition from fdisk -l and also create the mountpoint (mkdir /home/knoppix/mac)

Some older macs use hfs filesystem not hfs+ so this command may work

mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd,ro /dev/sdax /home/knoppix/mac

as before use the correct partition for sdax and create the mountpoint.

Not had a lot of experience with Macs, but they are based on FreeBSD so some linux commands are familiar once you get to the terminal.

[spongebue]

Thanks for the response. I actually have it mounted just fine. I can navigate through the system folders just fine, and can see what's in the user's folder, but cannot go into most subfolders (Documents, Music, etc). Just "Public" and "Sites." I can't remember exactly which commands I used to mount (just copied what I saw on another website) but maybe that method would do it.