Mounting a DMG with Apple_UFS

[Soylent Yellow]

I am trying to mount an old disk image (DMG) that I created in 2005. hdiutil doesn't seem to want to mount it:

$ hdiutil mount Chlorophyl.dmg hdiutil: mount failed - Geen activeerbare bestandssystemen

I see that there is a file system on the DMG, but it seems to be UFS. All the craze in 2005, but seems to be extinct in 2020. This is what the partition table shows:

$ hdiutil pmap Chlorophyl.dmg

MEDIA: ""; Size 3 GB [6699008 x 512]; Max Transfer Blocks 2048 SCHEME: 1 APM, "Apple Partition Scheme" [1] SECTION: 1 Type:'MAP'; Size 3 GB [6699008 x 512]; Offset 1 Blocks (6699007 + 1) x 512 ID Type Offset Size Name (3) -- -------------------- ------------ ------------ -------------------- -------- 1 Apple_partition_map 1 63 Apple 2 Apple_UFS 64 6698928 disk image 3 Apple_Free 6698992 16 Explicit Record

Is there any way to mount this partition still? It seems like Apple_UFS has gone the way of the dodo, and hasn't been supported in MacOS for ages. Not that I find any proof of that, I just can't find any documentation of it anymore. Or am I missing something?

If anybody knows which macos version was the latest to support UFS I'd be happy as well, then I could hunt for an old machine that still runs that version.

 

[chown33]

I searched for "macos support for ufs" and came up with this:

Mac OS X Support Essentials: File Systems | File System Components | Peachpit

In this chapter, you will examine the storage technology used by Mac OS X. Storage hardware like disk drives and RAID will be covered alongside logical storage concepts like partitions and volumes. You will learn how to properly manage and troubleshoot these storage assets and to manage storage...

www.peachpit.com

It says UFS ceased being supported as a bootable format as of 10.5. It doesn't say when (or whether) it stopped being supported at all, but it's from a fairly old book, so it may not have been known at the time.

The implication from that page is that UFS is still supported in 10.5 as a r/w format, just not a bootable one. The safest bet is probably to try mounting it in 10.4.

Some other interesting options also appeared in my search results, like the UFSExplorer product.

 

[Soylent Yellow]

Some other interesting options also appeared in my search results, like the UFSExplorer product.

That UFSExplorer was a lifesaver. It can open UFS partitions, and preview the files, save the partition as s DSK disk images, and copy all the files (the latter only when you pay the license).

It doesn't work with encrypted images however, UFSExplorer sees does as one big unknow file system. So I had to use Disk Utility to copy from the encrypted DMG to a new, unencrypted DMG. This crashed on the first try (when I tried to copy to a read-only image). Second try, copying to a read/write uncompressed image worked fine.

The unencrypted image was recognized immediately by UFSExplorer.

Thanks!