How do I mount an ext3 drive?

Karl,
First, thanks for responding. Yes, I did look at man mount, and then also looked around at the different specific mount commands at the bottom and didn't find what I hoped to find.

Unfortunately the ext2fsx project seems a bit unmaintained at the moment. The news link in the upper right, entitled 'Tiger and ext2' says:

<quote>
Posted By: bbergstrand
Date: 2005-06-16 17:39
Summary: Tiger and Ext2
I've had a request to post something about Tiger support -- so here it is:

Apple completely changed the kernel interfaces in Tiger and as such, a lot of work needs to be done to get the Ext2 driver running on Tiger. I started some of this work last year after WWDC, but there is still a lot to do and I don't have the time to finish things up right now.

I do plan on getting back to this at some point (hopefully before the end of the year -- but no guarantees). In the meantime if anyone wants to help out, check out TOT from CVS and have at it. Patches can be submitted via the patch tracker.
</quote/

So this doesn't appear to be an option.

I think Camelot's proposition to do it via NFS isn't bad, but not great for my more realtime audio work. I'd hoped to be able to physically move the 1394 drive. I hate getting the network involved in recording and playback operations.

I will next investigate the HFS/HFS+ option. I built it into my kernel but I don't know how good that is on Linux. The problems with msdos partitions are legion, but in my case it just plain doesn't work. I've got about 60GB of audio existing in a hierarchy where the path names are jsut too big for that file system type.

I am hopeful that I won't have that problem with Mac's file system.

Thanks for the answers, if more than a bit disappointing. Maybe I should write Apple about supporting this? As a new user who was, apparently led astray by the folks at the Apple store, it sure would be great to get support for this. (Fat chance I'm sure...)

Cheers,
Mark

Bill,
I wonder if you could share how you formeatted your external drive (1394 I presume?) to use HFS+? Working in the GUI the only thing I've found so far is something called 'Disk Utility'. I plug in my 1394 drive, and it's recognized, but it only seems to want to let me use FAT32.

I'm fine with doing this from the command line if it's necessary. Currently with the drive attached I put FAT32 on and named it Musiclib:

mini:~ root# df
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3 156039264 24775080 130752184 16% /
devfs 194 194 0 100% /dev
fdesc 2 2 0 100% /dev
<volfs> 1024 1024 0 100% /.vol
automount -nsl [113] 0 0 0 100% /Network
automount -fstab [118] 0 0 0 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [118] 0 0 0 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk1s1 160797248 512 160796736 0% /Volumes/MUSICLIB
mini:~ root#

I would prefer to lay the partition down using the Mac since it's probably better at understanding HFS2 than Linux is.

Thanks!

Thanks. This is interesting. I've not seen any options for using HFS+ on my external drive. Now, while roaming around and looking at all the options I see that there are two different partitioning schemes. The drive, as set up by Linux originally, is called the 'PC Partitioning SCheme'. It appears to only allow MSDOS as a file system type.

There is a second partitioning scheme which is Apple's scheme, and in this setup I can choose

Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case Sensitive)
Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive)
UNIX File System
Free Space

I take it from earlier posts that possibly the case sensitive versions didn't work?

Now, the $64K question - what is 'UNIX file System'?

This is very helpful. I'll partition a new drive with 5 partitions and try them all just to see how it works out.

Cheers

Thanks again for all the info. And I'm sure I don't know as much as you do but I'm trying.

I'm totally sure it's me but the one thing I cannot get past here is that when I'm in Disk Utility and I choose the PC Partition Scheme I'm not allowed to format with anything other than msdos. (FAT32 under the hood)

This is OS X 10.4.2, and Disk Utility 10.5.1 (198.1) It just doesn't allow HFS+ when using a PC partition scheme.

So far the tools I've found for HFS+ on Gentoo allow me to mount, unmount, list, copy, etc., but they don't allow me to actually format the filesystem itself. I can mark a partition in fdisk, but so far I haven't figured out what filesystem type is HFS+.

Anyway, I'll keep messing with it. Maybe I'll make a breakthrough in my understanding. Again, thanks for the help.

OK, I'll continue to look at that. So far I cannot get my Gentoo system to even recognize that a disk partitioned and formatted like that even has a partition on it, much less mount. Tomorrows tasks are defined.

Hi Bill,
OK, I've made considerable headway. Mostly this is feedback for any other poor folks like me who come along in the future.

1) It turns out there are MANY disk partition schemes recognized by the Linux kernel, but the default setting is to recognize only the 'PC BIOS (MSDOS partition table) support'. To get a Linux box to start recognizing Apple partitions you need to enable 'Macintosh partition table support'. These and other formats are located in make menuconfig under

File systems->Partition Types

2) Once you are set up to recognize Apple partitions then you have to enable support for Apple's file systems.

File systems->Miscellaneous filesystems

Apple Macintosh file system support (EXPERIMENTAL)
Apple Extended HFS file system support

With this added to my kernel config I rebuilt, rebooted and start to see some life in my 1394 drives. However, I'm not home yet.

3) An 'interesting' 😉 aspect of the Apple Partition Scheme appears to be the generous use of partitions. On a 1394 drive formatted in Disk Utility with a single partition the Linux system says there are 11 partitions:

8 32 80418240 sdc
8 33 31 sdc1
8 34 28 sdc2
8 35 28 sdc3
8 36 28 sdc4
8 37 28 sdc5
8 38 256 sdc6
8 39 256 sdc7
8 40 256 sdc8
8 41 131072 sdc9
8 42 80286248 sdc10
8 43 8 sdc11

This is an 80GB drive. The partition I care about in this case turns out to be sdc10. If I attempt to mount it as an hfsplus partition then I get intersting results:

lightning ~ # mount -t hfsplus -o rw /dev/sdc10 1394-1
lightning ~ # df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 9614148 7278376 1847396 80% /
udev 255188 340 254848 1% /dev
shm 255188 0 255188 0% /dev/shm
myth14:/video 225373664 151698176 62227168 71% /video
/dev/sdb1 57685532 47539424 7215856 87% /home/mark/music
/dev/sdc10 80279272 35536 80243736 1% /root/1394-1
lightning ~ # ls -al 1394-1
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5 Oct 19 13:51 .
drwx------ 22 root root 4096 Oct 20 08:47 ..
drw------- 1 99 99 7 Oct 19 13:54 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt 1 99 99 2 Oct 19 14:37 .Trashes
lightning ~ #

Nothing necessarily wrong with that. However , if I attempt to mount it as an hfs partition I also get intersting results:

lightning ~ # umount 1394-1
lightning ~ # mount -t hfs -o rw /dev/sdc10 1394-1
lightning ~ # df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 9614148 7278380 1847392 80% /
udev 255188 340 254848 1% /dev
shm 255188 0 255188 0% /dev/shm
myth14:/video 225373664 151698176 62227168 71% /video
/dev/sdb1 57685532 47539424 7215856 87% /home/mark/music
/dev/sdc10 80285412 80285412 0 100% /root/1394-1
lightning ~ # ls -al 1394-1
total 1236
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7 Oct 19 13:51 .
drwx------ 22 root root 4096 Oct 20 08:47 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1257472 Oct 19 13:51 Desktop DB
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 19 13:51 Desktop DF
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 19 13:51 Finder
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1781 Oct 19 13:51 ReadMe
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 19 13:51 System
lightning ~ #

So far I trust the second one more than the first. However, every time I mount it as hfs (not hfsplus) I get a message in dmesg like this:

HFS-fs: Filesystem is marked locked, mounting read-only.

This may all be related to your comments earlier about which filesystem type you could make work. I need to go back and try all of them out to see what they all do. It may also be realted to the experiemental nature

Hi Lutz,
Yes, ext2fsx looked interesting but I'm running Tiger and it doesn't work.

That said I've gone the other way around. I'm now using hfsplus drives mounted on my Gentoo machines. They seem to work fine so at least I have a solution that works with Tiger.

Thanks!

- Mark