Re: HFS as GS/OS boot volume

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Charles Stephens <devnull@dobbs.eng.sun.com> wrote:

>I have a IIgs with a Zip drive.  Right now I have a 32MB ProDOS
>partition and the rest as a HFS partition.
>
>What I would like to do is have a 100MB HFS partition and install
>System 6.0.1 on it.  Now, it appears that the Sys6 Installer disk does
>not have HFS FST on it.  So I was going to work around this by making
>a bootable system disk with the appropriate FSTs on it and run the
>installer off the second drive.
>
>My question is how reliable is HFS under GS/OS?  I remember reading
>somewhere that there were some problems with 6.0.1 that might lead to
>long term corruption.  Is this true?

An HFS Zip disk when formatted actually has a capacity of
something like 96MB....you lose some storage to formatting.
At this size, the bugs in question do not have an effect, so
the stories you read don't apply to Zips.  ;-)

That's not the problem, however.  The reason the Sys6
installer lacks the HFS FST is because you can't use an
HFS disk as a boot disk without an accompanying ProDOS
partition.  As a data disk, your single partition HFS Zip
disk is fine.  However, Apple didn't provide the necessary
boot file for HFS.

David Empson explained this in this NG some time ago.
The only two file systems currently bootable for GS/OS is
ProDOS and AppleShare.  The boot file for ProDOS is in
the little "ProDOS" file in the root directory of your GS/OS
boot disk (not to be confused with the "ProDOS" file in
ProDOS 8).  The boot file for AppleShare is another one.
Theoretically, boot code for HFS is a possibility, but Apple
never gave it to us....