Disk Images

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WizKid
Tinkerer
Posts: 72
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2016 11:58 pm

Disk Images

Post by WizKid »

Is there a way to mount disk images formatted with Mac OS Standard (HFS) in recent OS X versions read/write?

All I get is the infamous error "please convert."

I've tried the updated version of HFS for osxfuse with no luck.
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mabam
Master Emulator
Posts: 497
Joined: Wed Apr 10, 2013 9:32 am

Re: Disk Images

Post by mabam »

There’s hfsutils which can be installed via homebrew: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/hfsutils

I’ve never used it myself, though.
Elyus
Tinkerer
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 12:35 am

Re: Disk Images

Post by Elyus »

Sadly, it's no longer easy for Macs to handle standard HFS. :sad: Apple continues to remove many backwards-compatible technologies, and mabam's advice of hfsutils is about the only workable solution.

It's worth noting that hfsutils is just a collection of command line tools; it has neither a GUI of its own nor support for mounting images to browse in Finder. This was enough of a hurdle that I ended up using Sheepshaver, but if you want to use macOS, I would recommend this helpful blog post. Basically, you have to connect the disk, call hmount, and then you can read/write data using hcopy until releasing with humount.

The author of that post was connecting a physical disk, so for an image, you'll need to use hdiutil to assign it a /dev endpoint:

Code: Select all

sudo hdiutil attach -nomount <path to image>
You can then use "diskutil list" to find the virtual disk number and run hmount. It can be later removed with hdiutil detach /dev/disk#.

Best of luck in your endeavor!


P.S. In case it's helpful: while you may not be able to mount HFS partitions for browsing in Finder, you can with ISO9660 partitions. I was working with hybrid CD images and even though the mount_cd9660 command line tool can't create traditional mounted images, it can mount to a folder:

Code: Select all

sudo mount_cd9660 -o nodev,nosuid,rdonly <path to image>  <path to empty folder to serve as mount point>
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