Dear Ambrose,
Ambrose Li wrote:
Have anyone tried to mount a Mac Syquest cartridge on a Linux system? I tried but Linux was not able to read the partition table.
[In case, Holger's message did not help You.]
This message is of little or no concern to You when accessing Macintosh volumes. The Macintosh uses a completely different partition table format than PCs. The Linux kernel itself - being a mainly PC-oriented OS - can not (yet) recognize a Macintosh partition table - as it states it. Of course this also means, that the usual partition devices (eg. sda1) become unaccessible, so You can only access the base devices (eg. sda).
For Macintosh paritioning purposes You may choose to use the MkLinux pdisk tool (able to read/write Macintosh partition tables, just like fdisk does with PC partitions; from ver. 0.4 also includes Mac application). However, simply for accessing (reading/writing) an already existing Macintosh volume You do not need to use that tool.
For reading/writing purposes You can use:
1. hfsutils, which is a package consisting of command line and/or X (Tcl/Tk) based tools for essentially replicating the functionality of ls, cp, mkdir, rmdir, rm, mkfs, etc. for HFS volumes (includes graphical frontend) PROs: completely userland solution - no need to be root to do insmod/modprobe mkfs functionality - able to create Macintosh volumes[*] CONs: completely userland solution - can only be used manually
2. hfs-fs, which is a kernel filesystem module (written by Paul H. Hargrove) PROs: * completely kernel solution - VFS module, any program can take advantage of * special compatibility modes for netatalk and CAP - seamless integration CONs: * completely kernel solution - need to become root to do insmod/modprobe * no mkfs functionality - can not create new volumes
Since both are HFS, You have the advantage of being able to read something written by the other (note: side effect: Macintoshes can also read and write these volumes :-), and this way You can eliminate some of the "CON"s.
[* - I have a concern about how to create a completely Macintosh friendly HFS partition map and volume(s) from scratch without using any Mac tools. Any help appreciated.]
I am using Linux 2.0.30, aha152x SCSI driver and hfs 0.95.
You do not state, whether You use hfsutils (which currently is at least at version 2.0), or hfs-fs (which has got its version 0.8.4 announced a just couple of weeks ago) [or did I miss any new announcements?].
I would recommend upgrading to hfs-fs 0.8.4 in case You do not yet have that, or have an older version.
Hope this helps, and I did not tell You too much things You already knew. Mail me, if You have additional concerns.
Andras Kadinger bandit@freeside.elte.hu