HFSPlus Drive not mounting

Arthurmeade12 · 2026-04-10 01:44:11

I have a 500GB Western Digital HDD that won't mount a brand new hfsplus partition, even readonly. I ran

sudo mkfs.hfsplus /dev/sdb1

and then tried to mount from the exact same computer, and I got the same error in dmesg:

hfsplus: unable to load nls for utf8

It seems a bit odd that an empty filesystem I created should be unable to mount from the same machine. Moreover, I know this is not a hardware issue: the drive mounts perfectly fine as hfsplus on my Fedora aarch64 computer, and it also mounts just fine on my Arch computer if I format as ext4. The issue is specifically mounting an hfsplus drive on my Arch computer.

I have run `sudo modprobe nls_utf8`. This appears to make no difference (it was already loaded).
My kernel is 6.19.11-zen1-1-zen - at this point I believe this is a kernel issue but more likely I'm making a mistake somewhere rather than the kernel having a bug.

I am happy to post relevant logs, but few seemed to be relevant (although I am happy to post these if I am incorrect):

`fsck` log (there were no errors)
`dmesg` output : only one line, already quoted
SMART Data: this is not a hardware problem (afaik)
Log of it mounting on Fedora

`sudo fdisk -l`:

]Disk /dev/sdb: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: 5000AAJ External
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 3E0A3230-6F9B-4435-B001-4EA97CDF012B

Device     Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdb1   2048 976773119 976771072 465.8G Linux filesystem

Nothing unusual from when the disk is attached:

][ 4838.442736] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 2
[ 4845.266083] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 4845.391011] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=1100, bcdDevice= 1.61
[ 4845.391017] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 4845.391019] usb 1-2: Product: My Book
[ 4845.391021] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[ 4845.391022] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 57442D574341505734313935323131
[ 4845.392495] usb-storage 1-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 4845.392636] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-2:1.0
[ 4846.423904] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       5000AAJ External 1.61 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 4846.424607] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/466 GiB)
[ 4846.425265] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 4846.425269] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[ 4846.425818] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Asking for cache data failed
[ 4846.425826] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 4846.449870]  sdb: sdb1
[ 4846.449986] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

Thanks for any help.

Last edited by Arthurmeade12 (2026-04-12 02:37:46)

Arthurmeade12 · 2026-04-10 02:26:08

I switched to the vanilla kernel and the mount works perfectly.

At this point, is there something in my configuration that prevents zen from loading hfsplus correctly? Or is this a genuine bug?

seth · 2026-04-10 07:17:32

Compare

zgrep -i nls /proc/config.gz
modinfo nls_utf8

Arthurmeade12 · 2026-04-12 01:04:44

No difference in config.gz between linux and linux-zen: https://pastebin.com/QnR8eQLM

`modinfo` gave different results, but this seems to be trivial metadata.
linux-zen:

filename:       /lib/modules/6.19.11-zen1-1-zen/kernel/fs/nls/nls_utf8.ko.zst
license:        Dual BSD/GPL
description:    NLS UTF-8
srcversion:     5A3B726DAED2DD468673B8D
depends:        
intree:         Y
name:           nls_utf8
retpoline:      Y
vermagic:       6.19.11-zen1-1-zen SMP preempt mod_unload 
sig_id:         PKCS#7
signer:         Build time autogenerated kernel key
sig_key:        26:74:05:9D:26:66:F8:AA:E4:EF:F7:CE:80:6A:04:BA:3F:89:0A:4B
sig_hashalgo:   sha512
signature:      30:64:02:30:1D:BE:40:26:58:23:9F:1B:AE:75:33:66:6D:3F:79:57:
		B1:14:92:E6:A5:79:E2:DD:D1:1D:BE:55:55:3D:FA:CC:88:94:E8:9B:
		5D:16:45:3D:C9:F9:5A:E2:FA:07:63:E3:02:30:54:BD:FF:37:D5:0F:
		82:30:73:C2:3F:7E:29:D3:7C:E1:A6:3A:91:4C:90:EC:AD:7A:DB:F4:
		E2:2F:7F:9D:87:AF:31:F5:9E:ED:10:F6:7F:CA:33:DB:E3:67:45:BD:
		66:55

linux:

filename:       /lib/modules/6.19.11-arch1-1/kernel/fs/nls/nls_utf8.ko.zst
license:        Dual BSD/GPL
description:    NLS UTF-8
srcversion:     5A3B726DAED2DD468673B8D
depends:        
intree:         Y
name:           nls_utf8
retpoline:      Y
vermagic:       6.19.11-arch1-1 SMP preempt mod_unload 
sig_id:         PKCS#7
signer:         Build time autogenerated kernel key
sig_key:        04:9E:10:5D:31:B6:6A:31:CC:0C:00:55:DC:F9:CB:CE:3A:CF:8D:E4
sig_hashalgo:   sha512
signature:      30:65:02:31:00:83:77:F0:DC:56:5F:65:91:4D:65:49:C1:B3:64:CC:
		00:55:A2:15:64:B4:C4:17:91:7D:7B:2B:09:C5:82:D1:18:B9:A0:E2:
		AF:42:8B:D4:8C:3E:9E:C4:1C:E9:68:FA:68:02:30:42:48:C6:24:67:
		31:9F:CD:BC:11:9D:D9:51:5F:08:CE:B0:35:59:8C:84:D6:B6:8F:BA:
		0F:A9:C1:1F:85:F8:A3:54:7D:36:AC:70:FD:B1:18:AB:54:8D:98:7E:
		AF:2A:B7

Last edited by Arthurmeade12 (2026-04-12 02:36:31)

WorMzy · 2026-04-12 01:36:06

Please use code, not quote, tags for text files and terminal output.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … s_and_code

Arthurmeade12 · 2026-04-12 02:38:17

Fixed the formatting.

seth · 2026-04-12 08:07:11

Looks perfectly sane and there doesn't seem to be any difference between https://github.com/gregkh/linux/commits … fs/hfsplus and https://github.com/zen-kernel/zen-kerne … fs/hfsplus (nor for nls)

So I'd suspect some rather obscure incompatibility w/ the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improv … schedulers because that's a main focus of the zen kernel.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-04-10 01:44:11

HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#2 2026-04-10 02:26:08

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#3 2026-04-10 07:17:32

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#4 2026-04-12 01:04:44

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#5 2026-04-12 01:36:06

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#6 2026-04-12 02:38:17

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

#7 2026-04-12 08:07:11

Re: HFSPlus Drive not mounting

Board footer