Mac HFS and HFS+ with MacOS Sonoma

[GuiBer]

Mac HFS and HFS+ with MacOS Sonoma

All Mac users, I think, know that Apple dropped the 32bit support starting with MacOS 10.15 Catalina.
The problem was not only that the 32bit apps ended to work, but ended also the option to mount old CDs, DVDs and their images (DMG, CDR, ISO, etc) on the desktop.
The best solution is, or was, to install MacOS Mojave in a partition or using UMS, VirtualBox or VMware Fusion to run Mojave or a previous OS and to mount the CDs or the CD images.

I know macFUSE is only a kernel extension but with a working implemented file system could help.
Looking around in Internet I discovered ‘FuseHFS for OSXFuse’, a file system that requires MacFUSE, and I tried it.
Well, on my iMac 27 Retina 5K 2020 (Intel), with MacOS Sonoma 14.3, now I am able to mount again on the desktop HFS and HFS+ CD images as well as real CDs or DVDs.
In details :
all CD images archived as .DMG, .ISO, .CDR, .Toast are mounted as only read if they are HFS and read/write if they are HFS+. .IMG are not mounted with an error.
real CDs and DVDs, if HFS+, are mounted.
real CDs, if HFS, are not mounted.
N.B.: if the CD is not mounted, there is a problem to eject it from the optical drive; the best solution is the terminal command /usr/bin/drutil eject

I can’t test this solution on a Silicon Mac, as well as under previous MacOS, but I think you can try it.
If not working, MacFUSE can be uninstalled easily.

These are the web addresses for both :
https://osxfuse.github.io   MacFUSE 4.6.0 (install, give permission and reboot)
https://thejoelpatrol.github.io/fusehfs/   FuseHFS 0.1.5 (install and it should work)

[joevt]

A couple issues with MacFUSE and fusehfs:
It doesn't mount HFS partitions on GPT formatted disks. It needs to be APM.
There seems to be a 2 GiB capacity/available limit.
inode numbers are not constant. I'm not sure what that affects. Maybe aliases?

[IIO]

APM & 2gb is just fine for OS9 users , but good to know.

[DieHard]

Thanks for this topic, I have had a lot of issues over the past year moving data from High sierra APFS drives to Monterey and above systems with drives not auto-mounting, APFS messages that the volume will not have all it's features... and other quirks, so I basically am sticking to "HFS+ Mac OS Extended Journaled" for all external tech drives.  For "cloned" fully bootable images (High sierra thru Catalina) I go APFS.  No more fully bootable images for Big Sir and above, always some quirk... added security is killing convenience... of well, I think there may be a "big picture" agenda anyway...   

"Hey, your personal computer is way too vulnerable even with our constant security updates, so the only safe volumes are now ACFS (Apple Cloud File System)", I'm waiting for this Apple announcement because that's the direction we're heading, slowly making personal storage devices an antiquated thing of the past.

[IIO]

the new system is called

FCK
APL

and it strangely seems to be identical with HFS+.

[adespoton]

So there's two versions of FuseHFS; we were banging our head against patching 0.14 to work ever since it broke (sometime around High Sierra).  Apple finally kindly fixed this for us by removing HFS support from the default filesystem bundle (instead of leaving an unusable stub in there like they had done before).

So 0.15 just has some tweaks to place the filesystem bundle in the correct place for modern macOS, and is otherwise indistinguishable from 0.14 that worked on OS X 10.6 - 10.11.

And as it's indistinguishable... it's essentially just hfsutils bundled up as a fsbundle.  So it shares the same limitations as hfsutils.

I will throw in one more warning: FuseHFS can stomp on Apple's implementation of HFS+ as well, and THAT can cause some issues with GPT formatted disks.  I've only ever had an issue once, and I fixed that by temporarily disabling MacFUSE and then re-enabling it, but there are definitely some minor differences.

That said, being able to load my HFS disk and CD images on Sonoma (on Apple Silicon) is a definite plus   Before I was having to boot into Linux to do it, which just felt wrong.  So now I can prep my OS 9 images on Sonoma, then write them out to disk

[edit] And now I remembered what the edge case is for me -- When using HFSFuse, if you create a sparsebundle and format it HFS+, and then "convert" that image to a new sparsebundle (which traditionally frees up unused space), the sparsebundle will balloon to its max size, because diskutil doesn't think it can see inside the file system to free up space, and so pads with nulls instead of stripping them.  Something to be aware of if you're using HFS(+) sparsebundles and HFSFuse.