Re: Macintosh driver error message

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

In article <4ci9m6$3do@ionews.io.org>, Myles Fudge <crownmi@io.org> wrote:
> Recently, I have been formatting ProDOS volumes.  I'm getting the error:
> 
>           [  Unable to load the Macintosh driver.  HFS partitions  ]
>           [  will not be useable on Macintosh computers.           ]

This message is generated by Advanced Disk Utility when you partition
a drive.

> I intend to make my HFS volumes useable on a mac... what am I missing 
> that was/wasnt included with my sys 6.0.1 disks?

You need a Macintosh device driver for your specific drive, and then
you need to get it into the special form that ADU needs in order to
put it onto the disk.

The Mac requires a driver on all hard drives.  It is stored in its own
partition, and there is information in the first physical block on the
disk which allows the Mac boot code to locate the driver.

ADU has a built-in driver that works with "Apple" brand hard drives
(other manufacturers' drives for which Apple has patched the
identification message in the ROM).  ADU checks to see if the name
returned by the drive starts with "Apple".  If so, it uses its
built-in driver.

If the drive does not indicate that it an "Apple" one, then ADU looks
for a file called "GenericMacSCSI" in the *:System:Drivers directory,
which must contain two resources: one hold the driver code, and the
other has information about the driver which needs to be placed onto
the hard drive when it is partitioned.

The main problem: most Mac drivers are specific to their own brand, so
you need the right one for your drive, or an actual "generic" driver
that will work with most hard drives.

Apple's own driver will actually work with any reasonably standard
hard drive (but not a removable drive).  Someone wrote a program that
extracts the Apple driver and driver info resources out of ADU, and
creates the GenericMacSCSI file containing them.

I managed to create this file for the driver I got with my SyQuest,
and I have subsequently used it on SyQuest cartridges and other hard
drives I've formatted, with few ill effects (it lets me eject a
non-removable hard drive, which is somewhat confusing).

> What does Jawaid's HFS patch do the the FST?

It fixes a bug that causes the FST to miscalculate the location of
allocation blocks on the disk, resulting in corrupted files.  If it
does this consistently, then you might not notice until two files
overlap, but a Mac repair utility will usually complain about a volume
which has any damage to the directory structure.  If it is just
overlapping data blocks, there is no way to tell, short of examing
every file to see if the data is correct.

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