How to read and write HFS+ journaled external HDD in Ubuntu without access to OS X?

See How to mount a HFS partition in Ubuntu as Read/Write? - Super User

To quote from the second/third answer down:

First, make sure that you have hfsprogs installed. Example installation command:

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

Next, mount or remount the HFS+ drive; commands need to be as follows:

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdXY /media/mntpoint

or

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /mount/point

...

Finally, if the drive was improperly unmounted or has otherwise become partially corrupted run fsck.hfsplus ... as such:

sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdXY

There is a goldmine of other information there regarding the mounting of HFS+ filesystems.

These steps works for me (Ubuntu Studio 14.04):

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

Check status of drive:

sudo fsck.hfsplus -f /dev/sdXY

Unmount deivce:

sudo umount /media/sebastian/devicename

(create folder to mount the drive)

Mount the drive with HFS+ read/write permissions:

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/sdXY /home/sebastian/foldername

I had this problem too. I tried fsck.hfsplus, umount, remount with sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw nothing worked for me.

What did work for me was :

1. unmount with sudo umount /media/myMountPoint
2. delete the mount point with sudo rmdir
3. recreate the mount point with sudo mkdir and
4. remount with sudo mount -t hfsplus -o force,rw /dev/xxxx /media/myMountPoint

Hope this will also work for you guys.