This is a recurring problem and occurs a few times a week.
I have an external hard drive which is hfs+. Every couple of weeks, for no obviuous reason, when I mount it by pluggin it in to my Ubuntu 11.10, it is read only and I can't copy any files into it.
I gksudo nautlius
and change the ownership and it magically works in some time. But returns to the read only state soon in a few hours-days without any rhyme or reason.
Right now my fstab
doesn't have any entry for my hard drive. What gives? What in the world is going on with Linux/HFS+? This is frustrating. I can't reformat my hard drive because I have almost a terrabyte of data in it and no receptacle to hold it while I reformat it.
Best Answer
This question was asked and answered over at superuser.com:
Journaling is a feature that helps prevent file-system corruption in case of sudden loss of power or major crash and also helps speed recovery during a filesystem check. Just so you know what you will be disabling. You can use a file-system without journaling, you just might have to wait longer and deal with more problems if your computer crashes or loses power.
Support for read+write access with journalling for HFS+ partitions is still in progress. You can forcibly enable it with recent kernels, but it's still considered unsafe [source].