How to mount Apple Core Storage partition
So I wiped my Mac Mini (OS X Lion) and replaced the OS with Ubuntu 12.04.2. So far so good, it works beautifully. But I'd like to still access the external backup drive's Time Machine contents. The drive was untouched during the install of Ubuntu. It's just an external 1TB USB drive. Problem is, the partition type is AF05 (Apple Core Storage) and not HFS+. Is there a way to mount this in Linux or am I stuck with having to find another Mac to do the data restore?
Here's the relevant disk layout info:
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.1
Type device filename, or press <Enter> to exit: /dev/sdb
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/sdb: 1953525165 sectors, 931.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 44A9E054-ABBA-4788-8D47-D473709370CB
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525131
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 10 sectors (5.0 KiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition
2 409640 1953262983 931.2 GiB AF05 TIMEMACHINE
3 1953262984 1953525127 128.0 MiB AB00 Booter 0x43773a38
And what I'd like to get at is that TIMEMACHINE partition, /dev/sdb2. Is there any hope?
Solution 1:
I found this paper which analyzes the security of FileVault 2 and the authors wrote this library which allows access to CoreStorage partitions via fuse.
Here's how to mount encrypted partitions, but I haven't tried it yet. They also mention on the front page that non-encrypted partition support is still being worked on.