How to mount EXT Linux partition on MacOS

The other day while having a great cup of Latin America coffee from El Salvador I found a way to mount my EXT Linux partition I have on an external backup WD drive. I didn’t know that MacOS could not mount it natively even when both Linux and MacOS come from the same mother UNIX.

Homebrew came to the rescue! First, make sure you have it installed. Then run these couple of commands in order to install the package ext4fuse. Open your terminal and run these two commands:

brew cask install osxfuse
brew install ext4fuse

Plug in the hard disk drive or storage device whose partition you want to mount and in the terminal run:

diskutil list

This will give you a list of storage devices attached to your computer. Lets say your device is disk2S1. Then you run:

sudo ext4fuse /dev/disk2s1 ~/tmp/MY_EXT_PARTITION -o allow_other

MY_EXT_PARTITION is only a sample name. You can name it anything you want. You need sudo privileges to run this command.

Now, you can use Finder to navigate to your /tmp directory and find the mounted partition. Or in the terminal do:

open ~/tmp/

Remember, this methods will give you READ ONLY rights to the mounted ext partitions. You cannot make changes to it. Can you view the files and copy them to your MacOS and then make any changes. Homebrew is very handy and help me mount my EXT Linux partition I have laying around many external hard drives.

Hope this little tutorial was helpful. Contact me if you have any questions or need help.