How to Mount HFS Classic Drives
Matthew Hughes (via Colin Cornaby):
Drives using the antiquated vintage HFS file system appear in Disk Utility, but you cannot mount them. Attempting to do so will produce the following error code: “com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 49153“.
Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward workaround — provided you’re confident enough with the Terminal. This requires you to install the HomeBrew package manager. Instructions can be found here.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to download the hfsutils application.
The files cannot be directly accessed in Finder, but there are shell tools to list folders and copy files.
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If all you want to do if grab files, MacFuse plus fuseHFS mounts them in Finder.
I do use my own modified fork of hfsutils with a Tcl script to dump filesystem to text so I can grep all my archive CD-ROMs. Remember Tcl?
There's also a Java GUI tool called HFSExplorer which is probably the easiest way to get files off these old discs.
One thing to note on this — hfsutils isn’t recursive when doing an hcopy — so you need to either roll your own script around it, or be very specific about what files you want (wild cards work, they just don’t copy things in subfolders).