Re: [IIGS]Hard drive

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Jerome Vernet <jeromevernet@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>It's working ! Wow !
>`
>The only thing is that the very very first partition of a mac HD is the Hard
>disk Driver for the mac. It's possible to put this partition at the end of
>the disk, then to create a first partition of less than 32 Mb, and it's OK.
>It's not very fast, in fact.

Oh-boy!  There is a way around this.  The HFS FST (or GS/OS?) was
designed to make the Mac driver partition invisible.  The problem was
that after GS/OS was written, Apple changed the name of the Mac
driver partition in the Mac software.

In order to get the Mac driver partition invisible, you have to use the
Mac driver within the resource fork of the IIGS's Advanced Disk
Utilities program.  So you must use the IIGS to partition the disk.
Here's the problem: Advanced Disk Utilities checks for an Apple
ROM in the drive before giving up the driver.

There is a program that extracts the Macintosh SCSI driver from
Advanced Disk Utilities and saves it to the drivers folder of the
IIGS.  This program is on the ground ftp server.  I forget what the
file itself was called.  MacSCSIextract.SHK or something like
that (or maybe GenericSCSIextract.SHK or GenericMacSCSI).

When you use Advanced Disk Utilities to create a partition that
is larger than 32MB, it realizes you intend to create an HFS
partition.  ADU then checks the drive's ROM to see if it is an
Apple brand drive.  If it is an Apple drive, ADU will create a Mac
driver partition and this partition will be invisible to the IIGS.  It
will put the Mac driver in its resource fork onto this partition.  If
the drive is NOT an Apple brand drive, ADU will check in the
driver's for a generic Mac driver and use that one.  If no drive is
present in the drivers folder, ADU reports the HFS partitions
will not be usable on Macs.

What the program I mentioned does is to take the Apple
driver and save it as the generic driver.  In this way, ADU will
use the Apple driver on the third party drive.  It works like
a charm.  Apple, as David mentioned, was just boneheaded.

By the way, if you use ADU to partition in this way, not only
will the drive be usable on both Mac and IIGS, but if the first
partition is ProDOS (and it can be if you use ADU to partition
this way), you can boot the drive on the IIGS.

Note: I don't follow this newsgroup that much anymore but
I am sure others who have used the program can guide you
the rest of the way.  Good luck!