RamFAST partition table different from Mac? Can't access drives under Linux.

["Scott Alfter" <KsIaLlLfStPeArM@MiEbRmS.NnOeWt>]

Recent 2.1.x versions of the Linux kernel have had an option by which they
are
supposed to be able to make sense of the partition table format used by the
Macintosh.  They also have some degree of support for HFS.  I got to
thinking that hanging my IIGS's hard drives off of the end of my Linux box's
SCSI chain, combined with these new capabilities, might allow a faster way
to get files over to my GS than going through the serial port.

I made sure that the GS's SCSI IDs (two 40-meg hard drives (one Conner
and one Quantum) and an Archive Viper 60S tape drive) didn't conflict with
the Linux box's SCSI IDs (for an internal Zip drive, an HP ScanJet 4p, and
the Adaptec AVA-1502 that runs the show on that machine)...had to open the
HD case for the first time in a few years to do that.  I unplugged the SCSI
cable from the GS and moved it to the scanner (turned off its internal
termination, of course).  When the Linux box booted up, it saw all five
devices just fine...the GS's hard drives appeared as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb,
the tape drive was /dev/st0, the scanner was /dev/sg0, and the Zip was
/dev/sdc.  When I checked the partition table on the hard drives with fdisk,
though, nothing showed up.  /dev/sda should have shown two partitions (both
ProDOS, so they might've appeared as "unknown") and /dev/sdb should have
shown two partitions (one ProDOS, one HFS).  Hex dumps of the two drives
showed normal-looking data within the space of each partition.

First, I was under the impression that the Apple II uses the same type of
partition table as the Mac.  I think I've heard of people taking hard
drives, Zip disks, and such that were used with a Mac and being able to just
plug them into a IIGS and read the data off of them by way of the HFS FST.
Is this true?

The $64k question: assuming that the Apple II and Mac use the same partition
table format, does the RamFAST store its partition data in a different
format
than Apple's products?  I don't remember having to back up and restore
everything back when I upgraded from an Apple DMA SCSI card to a RamFAST, so
that would seem to indicate some degree of commonality.

Might there be a slight difference between types that would cause Linux to
ignore the partition information on my GS's hard drives?  The code that's
supposed to deal with Mac partitions is in drivers/block/genhd.c; the kernel
option to include the capability is CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION, which is what
you'd want to find in genhd.c.  I don't have much of an idea what
partition-table data would look like on either system.  Might the fix be as
simple as a few more lines of code added to the Linux kernel to pick up on
some slightly different identifying information, or is more needed than
that?  Is what I'm asking even feasible?  SCSI beats serial any
day...besides, possibly adding ProDOS filesystem support to Linux might be
kinda neat. :-)

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