hard disk chronicles

[shack@onyx.southwind.net (Randy Shackelford)]

Well looks like I finally found a satisfactory way to replace my old 105
mb hard disk with a 200+ mb drive. Satisfactory meaning having a 32 mb ProDOS
volume and the remainder of the space as an HFS volume, with no funny errors
popping up when the finder comes up. Being Mac accessible was a must as well,
in order to maintain the HFS volume.

The first, most obvious method was to use Apple's HD SC setup formatter 7.3.5,
since it can make ProDOS volumes, and mounts 'em on the Mac as well. This
worked, but had the undesirable side effect of giving an error for an
unrecognizable volume each time the finder came up. This is because 7.3.5
places a SCSI manager 4.3 compliant device driver on disks it formats, and
the driver partition is named APPLE_DRIVER43 to signify this. GS/OS knows
to ignore partitions named APPLE_DRIVER, but the 43 on the end fools it into
thinking the driver partition is an invalid volume.

The next choice was to use Transoft SCSI Director, like on my 105 mb. It's
old enough to not do the 4.3 driver so no worry like that. I decided to try 
my old Quantum Prodrive 210S with this formatter. I ran into vanishing volumes
plus the same problem someone else reported with phony write protection etc.
This is an old clunker of a hard disk which will be relegated to light use at
most.

Next idea: use HD SC setup 7.0.1 and go back to the Apple ROM equipped Quantum
240 I started with. This is an old version which doesn't do the 4.3 driver.
It also won't do ProDOS volumes and apparently won't do more than one HFS 
volume per disk. So the trick I used was to make a 32 mb HFS volume and the
rest into an A/UX volume. Once done, I swapped it onto the IIgs and made the
A/UX volume HFS and erased the 32 mb HFS volume into ProDOS. Finally, I got
a 200+ mb hard disk formatted the way I want. Only thing is, the ProDOS 
volume doesn't mount on the Mac, not a problem at all for me. It would have
if I had used 7.3.5, but that's not as important as not having the 4.3
driver make a phony volume show up on the IIgs.

Here are some results that anyone who bothered to read this far might want to
take note of: I was curious to see whether any file system problems would
crop up on the 200 mb HFS volume. We've had some alarmists warn against
using HFS volumes over 96 mb, I think the number I've heard is. So I had both
drives on the IIgs and copied the 700+ files from the 70 mb volume on the
105 disk to the 200 mb volume on the 230. Then I put the 230 on my Mac and
ran Norton Disk Doctor to look for problems. What did I find? Well a few files
had their "bundle bits" set wrong, so Norton fixed 'em. Gee, I've had problems
that bad copying that many files from volume to volume on Macs. Also since
Norton doesn't understand IIgs style forked files, it said my rsound files
had damaged resource forks. But I knew that was bogus.

So why is it that I had no problems at all with this much HFS file I/O? Clean
living perhaps? I do have the patched FST installed. Maybe doing your disk
formatting on a Mac has an effect. In any event, I've never had a file system
problem on any size HFS volume I've used with GS/OS.
--
Randy Shackelford
shack@southwind.net