Reading HFS standard and MFS on Catalina

Question

Level 1

10 points

Reading HFS standard and MFS on Catalina

During the lockdown I decided to use some of my time to backup all the all Mac disks and floppies I have at home so I can store them in a somewhat more readable format that SyQuest cartridges and MFS formatted SD 400k floppies and finally free up lots of space in some libraries.

Doing so I eventually discovered that macOS Catalina can neither mount HFS "non plus" (Apple removed HFS standard support in 10.15, apparently just for the sake of it... Hating this approach to "old", even more when keeping support for FAT12 DOS floppies and removing support for Apple formatted floppies...) nor MFS (it's actually not supported since Mac OS 8, but from Mac OS X 10.4 Apple offered sources to build a MFS read only support using the great system expandability features that OS X inherited from NeXT).

So, after the still ongoing struggle to get data off damaged floppies (I started weeks ago and still probably have a couple of weeks to go) I'm wondering how to easily access that data from disk images. I know I can use emulators such as minivmac, Sheepshaver and Mojave on VirtualBox to access that data, but that would mean a lot more work to get readable data. I'd love to simply be able to mount old disks and access data through Finder.

I found many open source projects trying to port both HFS and MFS to OS X

HFS Standard

HFS standard options are still in /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs plists, so I'm wondering if Apple disabled old HFS support through some external option. Does anyone know if there's any option to enable it back? (Maybe something like boot-args="no32exec=0" to run 32-bit code). Does anyone know what would happen if I took hfs.fs from Mojave and used it in Catalina? Would it possibly work?
thejoelpatrol/fusehfs GitHub repo -> managed to build it botching the code but when I mount Standard HFS images I get errors such as "Device not configured"
0x09/hfsfuse GitHub repo -> it builds and installs correctly, but when I try to mount old HFS images I get Plain HFS volumes not currently supported. "Couldn't open volume: Undefined error: 0"
hfsutils (https://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/) -> these are the only working ones but they're a mess to work with. FuseHFS is apparently working with it, but surprisingly it doesn't seem to work
elliotnunn/machfs GitHub repo -> I was suggested this library, it seems a great idea, but using DumpHFS seems like using hfsutils

MFS

MFSLiveshttps://web.archive.org/web/20080517055506/https://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MFSLives/index.html -> this was the sample code that apple distributed from Tiger onwards. I read it was supported even on 10.8. Unfortunately it's built for 32 bit so Catalina can't use it (why do they keep removing features?) and I can't get it to build in Xcode.
d235j/fusemfs GitHub repo -> I can't find a way to build it either, even after updating the project, updating the code from linked repositories to the last version. Even if libfuse_ino64.2.dylib is in /usr/local/lib and that path is added to Xcode options I just keep getting ld: library not found for -lfuse_ino64.2

Unfortunately I'm too much of a noob to be able to update those project, but I think it would be great if Apple offered to its user the chance to read their old Mac data like we're able to do with old DOS disks.

This way of treating "old stuff" doesn't seem random, but I really can't get why Apple is taking out features like that. I mean: ok, if that was an API you wanted to stop people from using that can be a strategy (like the one on OpenGL or the decision to never support Flash on iOS), but what's the strategy in removing read only access to data for long time users? I really can't understand...

Posted on Apr 29, 2020 8:10 PM

Reply

Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

68,516 points

Apr 30, 2020 8:44 PM in response to gio.bertelli

Try booting from a Knoppix Linux USB drive. Knoppix is like the swiss army knife of boot disks. It should be able to read from HFS volumes. I don't know about MFS volumes. You can create a bootable Knoppix USB drive using Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux). Option Boot the USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". While Knoppix is booting the Mac may appear to be frozen on the Apple boot picker menu so give Knoppix lots of time to finish booting.

Linux is unable to write to HFS+ (Journaled) or APFS volumes so you will need to transfer the files to a volume with FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, or HFS+ without a journal, or to a network share.

Reply

Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

68,516 points

May 2, 2020 8:09 AM in response to gio.bertelli

I thought you wanted to recover files from the old devices? Plus you are trying to get all sorts of open source tools to work. Why clutter up your Mac and waste time trying to get those open source tools working on macOS when Linux (and Knoppix specifically) has them ready to go? I can understand wanting to have your OS of choice perform a specific task, but this wasn't clear in your original post.

While I too would expect macOS to be able to read HFS volumes maybe those volumes/disks are failing, damaged, or degraded after all this time. macOS is not very good at handling unexpected situations and errors. I have found macOS to be a terrible OS for data recovery even though the same tools are available as on Linux. Plus from what I've seen macOS (along with Apple) is on a downward spiral the last few years with some very weird & unexpected behaviors.

I've found Linux does a good job of dealing with situations that are not ideal such as failing, damaged, or degraded media. At the very least it is a good way to make sure the media can still be read. If Linux is unable to access those HFS volumes, then most likely you will need to contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck.

Reply

Answer 3

gio.bertelli Author

Level 1

10 points

May 1, 2020 10:38 PM in response to HWTech

I know Linux, I was asking coz I'd like to read an apple file system format directly from an Apple OS, that doesn't seem such a strange desire, after all HFS "standard" was used until less than 10 years ago AFAIK...

Reply

Answer 4

HWTech

Level 9

68,516 points

May 2, 2020 11:36 AM in response to gio.bertelli

gio.bertelli wrote:

I'm not angry against you, of course, and thank you for proposing linux, could be a great idea to have some sort of raspberry pi server to connect HFS drives to so I could read the data, I'm only very angry about Apple.

Catalina (just like iOS 13) was an utter bug mess, 32-bit support removal was even more of a mess (they thought a bit better about it only in 10.15.4 update)... I miss the Snow Leopard times...

I actually missed Tiger for the longest time as I never had any issues with it. Snow Leopard was Ok too, but it wasn't as stable & reliable as Tiger. I've been on Yosemite since I dislike the changes to Disk Utility and I use it a lot. I never upgraded to iOS13 due to all the issues, but hate being on iOS12 since it doesn't receive security updates which is not right. It does seem every update triggers more issues. I see a lot of similarities to Win10 these days with buggy updates. How Apple messes it up by controlling everything is beyond me. I'll stick to Linux until it degrades to the same levels.

Reply

Answer 5

gio.bertelli Author

Level 1

10 points

May 2, 2020 10:19 AM in response to HWTech

Thanks, sorry, I was super anxious yesterday.

I have already saved copies of the data through an old PowerBook G3, I created floppies images that are now read both through Basilisk on System 7 for MFS and HFS images and mounted by Disk Utility on macOS for DOS images.

I was trying open source solutions coz as far as I know no-one has a solution to this feature-removal process on macOS, not even paid software. I will not read my old data, luckily I still have working hardware to do so. But this screw you way of doing things makes me go mad every time I think about it.

It's not even removing the headphone jack to jump start the wireless headphone business, and not even a technical motivation (HFS support libraries are usually just a couple hundreds lines of code), it's just a plain screw you to long-time users, and I don't really get it.

I'm not angry against you, of course, and thank you for proposing linux, could be a great idea to have some sort of raspberry pi server to connect HFS drives to so I could read the data, I'm only very angry about Apple.

Catalina (just like iOS 13) was an utter bug mess, 32-bit support removal was even more of a mess (they thought a bit better about it only in 10.15.4 update)... I miss the Snow Leopard times...

Reply

Reading HFS standard and MFS on Catalina

Similar questions