Re: [SLUG] mounting unusual filesystems

[Tom Massey <tmas5640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Freedman wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to mount unusual partitions under
> linux (like, say, maybe old Mac (not even sure what filesystem they use)

You need to compile hfs (the Mac filesystem) support into the kernel,
and then you should be able to mount them just like any other disk - eg
`mount -t hfs /dev/fd0 /mnt/macfloppy' or something. Have a look in your
kernel source tree under fs/hfs/ for some details. This'll work unless
you're dealing with a floppy from a *really* old Mac ie before the Mac
Plus, they used a different file system which is not supported. The
other thing is that some Mac floppies are formatted in such a way as to
be physically incompatible with non-Mac drives - 400 and 800 k disks may
just be unreadable to your drive. I've had mixed success with this, more
modern floppies generally work, older ones often don't. The other thing
you might want to look at is the 'macutils' package, which has a bunch
of tools for dealing with Macintosh file formats.

> or even Apple II/IIgs disks (which were ProDos??)).

The Apple II's had ProDOS as an operating system, not sure of filesystem
type, but the IIGS can handle a bunch of different ones, including hfs
(Mac). In theory you could probably put stuff from a IIGS onto an hfs
disk, then copy it to your Linux box (so long as the floppy worked in
your drive). I really doubt you'd be able to get anything off an earlier
Apple II than IIGS, but if you work out how please tell me, I've got a
IIC. But if you want to do something really cool with your IIGS, run
Unix on it with GNO/ME
<http://www.hypermall.com/companies/procyon/gnome.html>.