I've got an old USB hard drive that was originally formatted as a backup
drive for a MacBook. At some point, somebody carved off some space and made a
second partition, accessible by default with GNU/Linux. The last time the
owner used it, they tried to update the Time Machine backup located on it,
but their MacBook file system was badly corrupted, the update didn't work,
and in the end they replaced their MacBook drive with a larger SSD.
I'm now trying to check the contents of both partitions from within Trisquel,
but the system is having a lot of trouble mounting even the partition that's
normally accessible. GParted is struggling to scan devices with the drive
inserted. When I tried to shut down Trisquel with the drive still plugged in,
it spat out a bunch of unhappy looking error messages, so I unplugged the
drive, and it shut down fine.
I did a web search looking for advice and found a bunch of articles about
accessing Mac formatted drives from GNU/Linux:
https://www.macworld.com/article/3003385/how-to-access-a-mac-drive-from-a-windows-or-linux-system.html
https://askubuntu.com/questions/332315/how-to-read-and-write-hfs-journaled-external-hdd-in-ubuntu-without-access-to-os
https://askubuntu.com/questions/100167/how-to-mount-hfs-drive-and-ignore-permissions
But I suspect the drive itself is bricked. Is there any way to probe it and
see what state it's in using command line tools?
