External drives formatted in Apple filesystems can be mounted in read write mode on Ubuntu Server OS, providing the drive is formatted in Apple HFS/HFS+ format. As of Jan 2025, there is very limited support for mounting Apple APFS formatted drives on Ubuntu, and they can only be mounted in read mode (using https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse library)

Summary

  1. apt-get install hfsprogs - Install hfsprogs package required to read-write to drives with file format HFS/HFS+
  2. sudo fdisk -l - fetch device block name and file type of externam drive.
  3. mkdir -p /media/[mount_name] - create mount point.
  4. sudo mount -v -t hfsplus -o force,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 [device_vol_name] /media/[mount_name]- mount the device volume at mount point.
  5. sudo blkid [device_vol_name] | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' - fetch device volume block id to use in /etc/fstab.
  6. sed -i '\$a '"UUID=[device_block_id] /media/[mount_name] hfsplus nosuid,nodev,nofail,force,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0" /etc/fstab - add device volume mounting to /etc/fstab.

Procedure

Install hfsprogs

Package hfsprogs is required to force rw mounting of HFS+ file systems.

apt-get update
apt-get install hfsprogs

Identify device volume

First, fetch the volume block details of the external drive. We do this by searching for Apple type devices excluding Apple boot devices.

sudo fdisk -l | grep Apple | grep -iv 'Apple boot'

If you have multiple Apple formatted external drives, identify the drive volume of interest from volume size. In our case we see that the drive size is 1.8T, and use that to fetch the volume name, which is the first argument returned.

DRV_SIZE=1.8T
BLK="$(sudo fdisk -l | grep Apple | grep -iv 'Apple boot' | grep $DRV_SIZE)"
BLK_NAME="$(echo ${BLK} | awk '{print $1}')"

fdisk -l also shows that the volume is type “Apple HFS/HFS+” which we can mount as type “hfsplus”. If the drive is Apple APFS format, it cannot be mounted read write on Ubuntu, and will need to be erased and reformatted as Apple HFS/HFS+ format using Disk Utility app or diskutil on MacOS machine.

Mount HFS

Next, create the directory that will be the mount point. On Ubuntu Server, external drives are mounted in /media. To associate the mount directory with the drive, we append the drive size to the drive name(replacing full stops with underscores).

DRV_NAME=seagate1-${DRV_SIZE//./_}
mkdir -p /media/${DRV_NAME}

Mount the device volume using -v for verbose, and force, rw to force mounting in read-write mode. User and Group permissions of the mount directory should be set to uid=1000,gid=1000 to set the primary account holder as user and group owner. The file system type is hfsplus.

sudo mount -v -t hfsplus -o force,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 ${BLK_NAME} /media/${DRV_NAME}

Confirm the drive is mounted with mount -l or ls -l /media

mount -l |grep -i ${DRV_NAME}
ls -l /media

Add drive to /etc/fstab

The mount rule needs to be added to /etc/fstab in order to mount the drive on reboot. The fstab file uses the block id to identify the device volume which we fetch with blkid which returns the block id as the second argument.

BLK_ID="$(sudo blkid ${BLK_NAME} | awk -F'"' '{print $2}')"
FSTAB_RULE="UUID=${BLK_ID} /media/${DRV_NAME} hfsplus nosuid,nodev,nofail,force,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0"
sed -i '\$a '"${FSTAB_RULE}" /etc/fstab

Confirm the drive is added with:

cat /etc/fstab

Note: the drive does not automount when plugged into Ubuntu Server machine. The user needs to run mount .... to mount it.

Troubleshooting

The drive may mount as readonly (ro), despite options force, rw in the mount command. This is detected as:

mount -l |grep /media
/dev/sdb2 on /media/seagate1-1_8T type hfsplus (ro,relatime,umask=22,uid=1000,gid=1000,nls=utf8)

Review dmesg:

sudo dmesg | grep hfsplus | more
hfsplus: Filesystem was not cleanly unmounted, running fsck.hfsplus is recommended.  mounti
ng read-only.

Running fsck.hfsplus on the drive fixed the issue, after which re-running mount correctly mounted the drive in rw mode.

sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdb2

Then unmount and remount disk. If not unmounting, ensure the mount point is not in use, navigate elsewhere, then use lazy unmount and forced umount if necessaary. If unmounted and still failing to umount due to ‘already mounted or mount point busy’ error, then reboot can be the easiest option to remount the disk.

cd
sudo umount -l /dev/sdb2
sudo umount -f /dev/sdb2