hfsplus problems

[jd1008]

On 03/04/2016 12:44 PM, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 03/04/2016 11:28 AM, Tim wrote:
>> Allegedly, on or about 03 March 2016, jd1008 sent:
>>> I have a 4tb hfsplus partition.
>>> Mounting and writing to it present no problems.
>>> However
>>> 1. sync command hangs
>>
>> Educated guess...  file system fault?  Is there a file system check
>> program for that particular filing system.
>>
>> Hanging sync sounds like it's not finishing updating the filesystem (the
>> original write seemed to work, because it didn't actually write and
>> complete when you thought it did, it's gone into cache, you're returned
>> to carry on doing other things, and syncing would be the next step in
>> the background (though it would try to do it, some time after the write,
>> before you tried manually syncing).
>>
>> Though, another thought is - would there be anything else with a grip on
>> the mount point, that's not letting go?
>>
>>> 2. umount of any hfsplus partion, hangs.
>>> 3. reboot hangs (it never reboots, forcing me to use the hard reset)
>>> 4. shutdown now hangs requires hard reset.
>>> 5. using the gui  system -> shutdown -> 
>>> [shutdown|restart|suspend|hibernate]
>>>      hang forever, thus also requiring hard reset.
>>
>> All of those would be failing for the same reason - trying to sync a
>> file system before it shuts down, and it'll wait until the sync
>> finished, or perhaps for a lengthy timeout.
>
> I'd agree with this. HFS+ is a journaled filesystem. Support for the
> journaling is fairly new to Linux and there may be some oopsies. In the
> past it wasn't even writable under Linux--you had to disable journaling
> on the filesystem on a Mac, then you could mount it RW on Linux. That's
> not the case now.
>
> I'd suggest running fuser or lsof and see if there's something using
> that drive before you try a shutdown or unmount.
Update:
I just inserted the drive (connected it to usb port) and got this in dmesg:

[10915.296084] hfsplus: Filesystem was not cleanly unmounted, running 
fsck.hfsplus is recommended.  mounting read-only.

The above message is due to yesterday's failure to umount.

I unmounted it (strange that it did not run fsck automagically), and ran 
fsck.hfsplus and remounted, copied
some files to it,  executed sync and all is now well.
So, I now must have totally overlooked the message in dmesg after 
connecting the drive,
and proceeded to write to it without first unmounting it and running 
fsck, and remounting it.

I wish that the user would get a visible banner about this. I did not 
see it yesterday, as I assumed all was well.

Thanx to all who replied.

Cheers,

JD