HFS+ Formatted Flash Drive Mounts as Read-Only
 

Hello,

One of my flash drives, which was formatted on my MacBook with the HFS+ filesystem, mounts just fine on my CentOS 4.4 box, however it insists on mounting as read-only. (I have the auto-mount service turned off, as I prefer to mount my volumes manually.) I've tried using a shell script that points to an entry in fstab, and also mounting directly with:

Either of the above methods will mount the drive, but read-only. (Adding the -o rw switch to the mount command does no good.)

Any thoughts on why I can't mount this drive as read-write? Thanks!

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe HFS+ support in Linux is still incomplete. Similar to NTFS support, reading the file system is safe, but writing to it is not. There may have been some recent advancements I haven't heard about though.

Thanks for the reply. If that's the case, since Mac OS X can't read ext2/3 or Reiser filesystems, I guess I'll have to reformat the drive with a DOS filesystem (which I was trying to avoid). That leads to another question: fdisk lists several DOS choices - which one should I use? (keeping in mind this flash drive will only be used on Macs and Linux PCs)

The choices include: FAT16, FAT16 <32M, W95 FAT32, W95 FAT32 (LBA), W95 FAT16 (LBA), W95 Ext'd (LBA), HPFS/NTFS

Which of these would be best for me, and why? Thanks.

Oh, I've replied to your other thread. So HFS+ is the current native Mac filesystem, isn't it?
Then, isn't it a former Mac filesystem (from the '90) that is better supported by Linux?

Yves.

Oh- we're tangled in two threads. :)

I'm not sure. I don't have my Mac with me at the moment, but it does offer a couple of formatting options. I remember there were several choices of HFS+, plus -I believe- UFS and UDF. Other than what I've just Googled, I know little about these.

Thanks,

Joe