Sunday, August 28, 2011

Format a disk with HFS+ using GParted on Ubuntu

If you have a Mac, it means that you always have trouble :P

You are using Ubuntu or any other linux dist, and have an external drive. You HAVE to format it with HFS+ because you want to use it with a Mac. Grrr...

No panic.. You are able to format your external drive using Ubuntu.. First thing to do is that you have to install "hfsprogs" package. Simply install it by typing the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs


Then, you can just use GParted to format your drive. Go to System > Administration > Gparted, select your external drive from the dropdown menu on the right. When you choose to format your disk/partition, you'll see "HFS+" as an option. Select it and wait a little bit. And.. Da daaa.. Now you can use your external drive with a Mac!

Hope it helps!.. Enjoy..

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Super!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Anonymous said...

I'm seeing comments on other sites that says Ubuntu doesn't play nice with journaling on hfs+ filesystems. The pages are older than yours, though. Do you know where this currently stands?

nadinima said...

well.. what i can say is give it a try.. because it simply worked for me.. and i think you won't be in trouble with this method..

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for this!! I had looked almost everywhere for a quick method to format (HFS+) some unallocated space on an external drive, after shrinking it with GParted.

Mabel said...

Thanks a lot! This worked so painlessly. Trying to create a exFAT partition in Windows on an external harddrive with MBR partition table and formerly single NTFS partition (now shrank to half the space) simply did not work. The partition was only recognizable in Windows; both OS X and Ubuntu saw it as unallocated space. GParted did the trick. Now I have a HFS+ drive recognized in both Ubuntu and OS X.

Anonymous said...

Daniel said...

Thanks so much ...you saved my day .Thanks

Anonymous said...

that did the trick, thanks!

Wilbert said...

Thank you so much, this was helpful!

Anonymous said...

This worked for me. I was just fooling a bit with formatting a USB drive. GParted + hfsprogs combined to format the USB drive. I was then able to plug it into a MacBook Pro and it recognized it right away. When I plugged it back into my Ubuntu laptop I noticed that OSX had added a number of folders and a file:

gorb@blarg:/media/gorb/lkasjdhlakSDJH$ ll
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Nov 12 14:29 ./
drwxr-x---+ 4 root root 4096 Nov 12 15:40 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 99 99 6148 Nov 12 14:29 .DS_Store
drwx------ 1 99 99 5 Nov 12 14:29 .fseventsd/
dr-xr-xr-t 1 root root 2 Nov 12 14:24 .HFS+ Private Directory Data?/
drwx------ 1 99 99 5 Nov 12 14:28 .Spotlight-V100/
d-wx-wx-wt 1 99 99 2 Nov 12 14:28 .Trashes/

Anonymous said...

Excellent solution, worked great. Appreciate the simple, yet effective method and post.

nadinima said...

It is great to see that this post is still useful for many ppl :)

Matt S Rinc said...

It was still useful. Though hfsprogs might not get installed. In that case do:

sudo add-apt-repository universe

followed by

sudo apt-get update

and then you can install hfsprogs as suggested.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a million i usually work with linux or windows and this saved me hours of frustration-with only a short read. thanks for your share

genix said...

You are a saviour buddy!!! As well as Awesome!!!

Unknown said...

Interesting post. Thanks for the information.

bogd740 said...

If you need to make it journaled you can do that by going to disk utility on mac and selecting the disk and then going to File > Enable Journaling.

Your Welcome