Mount Linux Disks on Mac OS

December 26, 2018 - 1 minute read - Category: Tech

When recovering data from the SSD in my broken Linux machine, I have to mount the SSD to a MacBook. The problem is that Mac OS does not support Linux ext4 format natively. Fortunately, there is an existing tool called ext4fuse that can solve this problem. And one good feature is that, according to its official GitHub page, ext4fuse is read-only also means that it’s completely safe to use.

There are three steps to mount a Linux ext4 format disk:

  1. Install the tools via brew: a. brew cask install osxfuse b. brew install ext4fuse

  2. Find the disk name (better be some disk partition) in the Disk Utility app on Mac. Usually, it is something like disk2s4.

  3. Mount the disk in the command line. For example, if you want to mount the disk called disk2s4, shown in the Disk Utility app, to the folder ~/mnt, you can type the command ext4fuse /dev/disk2s4 ~/mnt. Remember to add the /dev/ before the disk name.