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Mount a HFS+ Journal Enabled drive in Ubuntu

I had some problems with this, and didn’t find any good answers on teh internetz. But after some thinking/more googling I came up with a solution. But first, the problem:

If you want HFS+ support in ubuntu, install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install hfsplus hfsutils hfsprogs

I had a FAT32 external usb disk, that showed up on /dev/sdb1 on my ubuntu 10.10 server. Mounting went fine and all was dandy, but then I got the bright idea to reformat the drive to HFS+ to support my Mac. After the HFS+ reformat (on my Mac) and recopying of files, putting it back in to my ubuntu computer and trying to mount it gave me some strange errors:

$sudo mount -f hfsplus /dev/sdb1 /media/external

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail

And dmesg took me to a “unable to find HFS+ superblock” message, witch took me to this page:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-991328.html

The clue I found here was that HFS+ had two partions, and for everything to work again I had to mount the SECOND partion, not the first, in otherwords /dev/sdb2 instead of /dev/sdb1. Simple, stupid, but very frustrating if you didn’t know. 

Mounting the second partion worked, but the drive was still in read only mode. That was fixed with a flag:

$ sudo mount -f hfsplus /dev/sdb2 /media/external -o forced

and a chmod and chown:

$ sudo chmod 777 -R /media/external

$ sudo chown gordito:gordito -R /media/external

Now everything works fine, and Journaling is NOT tured off! Good luck!