How to Mount & Copy HFS Classic Mac Drives on MacOS

Modern variations of MacOS not help HFS, that means that new Macs can not learn, mount, or write to traditional HFS drives. But a good quantity of longtime Mac customers proceed to have older Macs and previous Mac laborious drives which might be in HFS format, manner back from the times of Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, and early Mac OS X, and thus might want to mount, learn, and duplicate recordsdata from these previous traditional HFS volumes, to their trendy Mac.

If you try and mount an HFS drive in trendy MacOS, you will note an error message stating “Could not mount “Name”. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49153.)” But don’t despair, there’s an answer obtainable.

Officially, MacOS deserted help for writing and formatting to HFS in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, after which MacOS deserted HFS learn help in macOS Catalina 10.15, so principally any trendy MacOS system doesn’t have the power to do something with these drives, together with Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, and so forth.

If you might want to mount and skim information from a traditional HFS formatted drive or quantity, and also you’re working macOS Sonoma, Ventura, or newer working techniques, you may nonetheless achieve this with the assistance of a HomeBrew software known as hfsutils.

How to Mount & Copy Data from HFS Drives to Modern MacOS

1. If you haven’t completed so already, set up Homebrew on macOS Sonoma or Ventura or newer earlier than the rest, that is required to have the ability to simply set up hfsutils
2. Install hfsutils through the use of the next brew command:

brew set up hfsutils

3. With hfsutils put in, join the HFS drive to the Mac, then back on the command line, use the next command to find the device identifier:

diskutil record

4. Locate the title of the HFS quantity, after which look underneath the “IDENTIFIER” column to seek out the device ID, it is going to be one thing like “disk3s5”
5. Now mount the HFS drive based mostly on that identifier, like so:

sudo hmount /dev/disk3s5

6. With the drive mounted, now you can record out the contents of that HFS drive using the ‘hls’ command (common ls won’t work)

sudo hls

7. The paths for HFS are delineated by : colon fairly than ahead slash /, so you might want to use : as a substitute, for instance to look into “Documents” it might be:

sudo hls ":Documents"

8. To copy recordsdata from the “:Documents” folder on the HFS quantity to the present Mac, it is strongly recommended to alter your PWD to the vacation spot folder you take into account, then use the next kind of syntax, on this instance we’re using a wildcard * to repeat every part from the Documents folder to the PWD:

sudo hcopy -r ":Documents*" ./

9. Confirm within the Finder (or Terminal) that your information copied from the HFS quantity to the fashionable Mac
10. When completed copying information from the HFS quantity, you may unmount the drive with:

humount

Your recordsdata and/or information ought to now be copied from the traditional HFS quantity to the fashionable Mac file system, even when it’s working macOS Sonoma or a brand new working system.

This tip was impressed by a submit I discovered on MJTSai, and made me do not forget that I’ve at the very least a half-dozen previous Mac drives with some historic digital content material that I don’t need to lose entry to. MJTSai pointed to this from MattthewHughes.co.uk, which referenced this from SwissMacPerson.ch, so every of these posts had been used as some reference materials for this text, cheers to them!

Do you continue to have any previous Mac traditional drives or volumes in HFS format that comprise information you’d wish to entry? Did the hfsutils resolution mentioned right here work so that you can copy information from these volumes? Did you discover one other resolution? Let us know what labored for you, to entry and duplicate information from previous HFS drives, to trendy MacOS!