IONclad Blog

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Ubuntu: No mac, and a bunch of HFS+ sad drives just moping around.

My dormant mac carries within her the platters crammed with all of my precious creations. Unfortunately for me, I had yet to make any sort of provision for exactly what ended up happening... a major 'something' that took my mac out of circulation.

Without another mac handy, how do I read the data I need to continue working?

After some research I found that Ubuntu will manage HFS+ discs without issue.  Well, that's partly true.

Apparently, if you formatted the disc using HFS+ Journaled, and experienced a crash where the drive was not unmounted properly, their journal will not be empty and Ubuntu will not then be able to write to it.   However, in practical experience, I found that no amount of unmounting on my friend's mac - I know, that sounds strange - would produce a situation where the drives could be written to normally with Ubuntu.
The solution which seems to work like a charm, is to simply log in as root.  Cleverly hidden in the mac, the root phenomenon is catchy and already has taken the Ubuntu world by storm.  The 'root' user is considered the 'god' of the computer.  Not logged in as god in day to day operations, it was a surprise to me to learn that with Ubuntu I could log in as a user with even more power! <insert spongebob laugh>
First, you will need to log in as Root user.  It's very easy.
Ubuntu apparently creates a random password for root, but you will need to create your own. 
INFO: Root

At the login screen, click other and type in 'root' in the user field, then the root password that you set using terminal, logged in as your user account.

Now, any formatted as HFS+ will be read/write accessible by Ubuntu as root, now I can get the data off, move things around and generally organize after losing the mac.  The partitioned 2TB drive mounts perfectly as the two volumes, even though it's original home was inside a mac.  So far I have only tested HFS+ via external USB cases, though I imagine SATA connections would work just as well. 

The two drive RAID inside the mac is still there.  A problem I don't yet know how to solve short of fixing the mac.

Now that I have my data, or at least a good portion of it, I can continue.

Next, Finding a replacement for Lightroom.

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