Partitioning Tool for Mac OS8.6

[Sascha Wostmann]

Hi,

is there a free tool that is able to partition and probably format
(with HFS) a SCSI disk on a PowerPC G3 with OS8.6 running?

I have tried to prepare the disk under Linux, but the Mac System
doesn't open it by no means...



Viele Grüße,
Sascha

 

[Mike Dee]

is there a free tool that is able to partition and probably format
(with HFS) a SCSI disk on a PowerPC G3 with OS8.6 running?

Yes. It's called "Drive Setup" and comes with the OS install CD.
It also gets placed into the 'Utilities' folder by default by the
system installer. It will format both HFS and HFS+ etc, and you can
create partitions.

 

[Sascha Wostmann]

Mike Dee :

Yes. It's called "Drive Setup" and comes with the OS install CD.
It also gets placed into the 'Utilities' folder by default by the
system installer. It will format both HFS and HFS+ etc, and you can
create partitions.

unfortunately not. It just shows the disk as "not supported". Does
that mean that the G3 can't use this brand new disk at all? If so, how
can I find out what drives it supports? And where can I obtain such a
disk nowadays? I can't replace the Mac because it is installed in a
laboratory equipment that can't work with newer systems

Could it be possible that if I partition and format the disk with
another Mac with a newer OS, that my old G3 can work with it?

I never experienced such problems before, neither on Windows nor Linux
systems...



Viele Grüße,
Sascha

 

[Mike Dee]

Mike Dee :


unfortunately not. It just shows the disk as "not supported". Does
that mean that the G3 can't use this brand new disk at all? If so,
how can I find out what drives it supports? And where can I obtain
such a disk nowadays? I can't replace the Mac because it is
installed in a laboratory equipment that can't work with newer
systems

Could it be possible that if I partition and format the disk with
another Mac with a newer OS, that my old G3 can work with it?

I never experienced such problems before, neither on Windows nor
Linux systems...

See if you can locate a copy of MacOS 9.x install CD and borrow the
"Drive Setup" utility from that. It is more forgiving than it's
previous versions and can also create Unix partitions as well.

Failing that working;

Go to <http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/hd.html>

At the top of the page are a bunch of 3rd party Mac Disk formatters.
Many of the links are dead. Out of the bunch, "Silver Lining Lite 2.0"
still downloads and may be worth investigating.

However, below this list are links to "Apple HD SC Setup v7.3.5" This
was the Mac SCSI formatter utility before "Drive Setup" was around.
This still runs under MacOS 8.6x.

Get the patched version [Apple HD SC Setup v7.3.5 (Patched) link]. I
haven't come across a 'not supported' SCSI drive this cannot format -
to date. Please don't prove me wrong One [big] caveat - this old
formatter will not know about HFS+ so if this drive is large you may
need to have a zillion partitions to keep file sizes sane

If the drive you're wanting to format is the start-up drive of the G3
then you'll need to place the formatter onto a boot disk or floppy [if
the G3 has a floppy drive] and run the formatter from that.

 

[Sascha Wostmann]

Mike Dee :

[lots of helpful info]

Thank you very much, Mike!

I am about to get crazy about that drive. It's 18GB in size, what did
you mean by many partitions to keep file sizes small? Is it like FAT
that small files use large clusters? Or does "normal" HFS not support
18GB at all? ATM there is a 2GB drive installed, so even if each file
uses 1MB min. cluster size, that would probably be sufficient.

I'll try the tools you mentioned and will tell you if this "Apple HD
SC Setup v7.3.5" works with my disk too.




Viele Grüße,
Sascha

 

[Mike Dee]

Thank you very much, Mike!

You're welcome. I've been doing some further rummaging around the
'net...

I am about to get crazy about that drive. It's 18GB in size, what did
you mean by many partitions to keep file sizes small? Is it like FAT
that small files use large clusters? Or does "normal" HFS not support
18GB at all? ATM there is a 2GB drive installed, so even if each file
uses 1MB min. cluster size, that would probably be sufficient.

This page explains it better than I:
<http://ericb.dyn.dhs.org/software/macslack/>

On HFS:

"cluster size must always be a multiple of 512 bytes, and since there
are a maximum of 65,536 clusters under HFS... cluster size increases by
512 bytes for every 32 megabytes of partition size...

....Suppose that you have a file that is 2460 characters (bytes) long,
and your cluster size is 1024 bytes. The Macintosh must allocate three
clusters (totalling 3072 bytes) for this file even though only 2460
bytes are used. The remainder of the third cluster, called slack space,
is wasted..."

etc, etc [an easy, fairly absorbing read].

However, the author of the above link also has a freeware program named
MacSlack - the beta version may be of interest to you and you can DL
from here:
<http://ericb.dyn.dhs.org/software/macslack/beta.html>
"MacSlack 1.1b3" [yay - we're back on topic]

This utility will convert a Mac HFS drive to HFS+ - So theoretically
speaking, you should now be able to format your drive as HFS using the
"Apple HD SC Setup v7.3.5 (Patched)" using as few or many partitions as
desired and converting these to HFS+ with "MacSlack 1.1b3".

I tested MacSlack beta in a G3 + MacOS 8.6 today on a spare 10Gb drive
which I'd partitioned and formatted as HFS - MacSlack did the
conversion to HFS+ easily and very fast. MacSlack's author stresses
that this is beta software and the worst can happen. - I didn't
experience anything bad, nor had any issues with it.

I'll try the tools you mentioned and will tell you if this "Apple HD
SC Setup v7.3.5" works with my disk too.

Any aversion to ResEdit?
I also came across a "How to patch Drive Setup" to get around those
"unsupported" errors, this appeals to me, as you'd then only need the
one tool to format your drive as HFS or HFS+. Requires the use of
ResEdit:
<http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/drvsetup.html>
- further examples and explanations:
<http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/post4.html>

Good luck.

 

[Sascha Wostmann]

Mike Dee :

On HFS:

"cluster size must always be a multiple of 512 bytes, and since there
are a maximum of 65,536 clusters under HFS... cluster size increases by
512 bytes for every 32 megabytes of partition size...

...Suppose that you have a file that is 2460 characters (bytes) long,
and your cluster size is 1024 bytes. The Macintosh must allocate three
clusters (totalling 3072 bytes) for this file even though only 2460
bytes are used. The remainder of the third cluster, called slack space,
is wasted..."

OK, thats what i knew from FAT partitions too.

However, the author of the above link also has a freeware program named
MacSlack - the beta version may be of interest to you and you can DL
from here:
<http://ericb.dyn.dhs.org/software/macslack/beta.html>
"MacSlack 1.1b3" [yay - we're back on topic]

I didn't had to pay anything yet, so I think we never really left the
topic

This utility will convert a Mac HFS drive to HFS+ - So theoretically
speaking, you should now be able to format your drive as HFS using the
"Apple HD SC Setup v7.3.5 (Patched)" using as few or many partitions as
desired and converting these to HFS+ with "MacSlack 1.1b3".

The patched Setup tool really was able to partition and format my
drive!!! There was no choice about the size so it created a 3.9GB
partition and left the rest of ~14GB empty.

I could manually create the second partition and format it as "MacOS
extended" (or alike) and now I have two drives on my desktop, 3.9 and
14GB each. Just what I wanted. Maybe I'll try the reformatting to HFS+
sometimes, but as it is now, I don't really care about cluster size.
When there is enough data on the disk, I archive to CD-R.

Any aversion to ResEdit?

don't know that.

I also came across a "How to patch Drive Setup" to get around those
"unsupported" errors, this appeals to me, as you'd then only need the
one tool to format your drive as HFS or HFS+. Requires the use of
ResEdit:
<http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/drvsetup.html>
- further examples and explanations:
<http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/post4.html>

Good luck.

seems I had the luck!

Thanks again,
Sascha

 

[Mike Dee]

seems I had the luck!

Phew

Cheers.