Re: mounting a Prodos hard rive on a Power PC

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:

> In article Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net> writes...
> 
> >Here's the deal: you apparently didn't format the IIgs' hard disk with a
> >Mac formatter which will put a driver on the disk which recognizes ProDOS
> >volumes as valid disk volumes. Ditto the software you're using to try to
> >mount the disk. To make matters worse, PC Exchange only supports ProDOS
> >on floppy disks. Apple did flub up pretty hard on that one. So there are
> >two things to try: If you formatted the IIgs' disk with Apple's
> >formatter, you can try updating the driver on the disk with a new one
> >that will recognize the ProDOS volume.
> 
>     Will FWB ToolKit install the proper driver on an existing ProDOS
> or HFS partition?

The driver is not installed inside a partition - it needs a separate
partition of its own.

The question is: what was used to partition the IIgs drive?

If it was a recent version of Advanced Disk Utility, then it will have
created four 16KB partitions of type APPLE_DRIVER, marked as empty.  In
theory, any Mac drive setup software (Apple's Drive Setup, FWB's HDT,
etc.) should be able to install a driver into one of these partitions.

The only problems I can see are:

(a) The driver code may be larger than 16K, in which case the partition
is not big enough.  The setup software may be forced to repartition the
drive.

(b) The driver might require a partition of type APPLE_DRIVER43 (if the
driver supports SCSI Manager 4.3).  It may be able to change the type of
one of the existing driver partitions for this.  (If it does, and you
connect the drive to the IIgs again, you will get the error mentioned by
Randy elsewhere in this thread).
 
(c) The driver that gets installed might not support ProDOS partitions
(type APPLE_PRODOS), only HFS ones (type APPLE_HFS).


If the drive was partitioned with something else, e.g. HDSCPARTITION,
Chinook SCSI Utilities, or an older version of Advanced Disk Utility,
then there will not be an empty driver partition, and the Mac software
will not be able to add a driver to the volume.

To be on the safe side, I'd strongly suggest making a backup copy of the
drive on the IIgs, before trying to run Mac sofwtware to add a driver.
It wouldn't take much to accidentally wipe the ProDOS partitions.


I'd also recommend AppleTalk as a much safer option.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand