Home » forums » Discussion » 680x0 Macs and Lisa

Compatible filesystem for MacOS 8.1 and A/UX 3.1.1?

Submitted by IceCap on April 1, 2006 - 10:34pm. 680x0 Macs and Lisa

I was wondering if there is a filesystem (other than HFS) that is compatible with both MacOS 8.1 and A/UX 3.1.1?

The only thing that I can think of is UFS but I'm not sure if that is supported on both systems. This is for my Quadra 950 with a PowerPC upgrade card, dual boot into A/UX (I know, doesn't work with the upgrade card) and MacOS 8.1, and ~76GB of SCSI storage in four 7200RPM Compaq drives. I'm planning on keeping each drive as a single partition so HFS is not going to work out.

Thanks

IC

» login or register to post comments | previous forum topic | next forum topic

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
alk's picture

FAT?

Submitted by alk on April 10, 2006 - 4:33am.

Since it's a SCSI disk, you should be able to format it as FAT16... I'm not sure if you can format as FAT32, but clearly that would be a better choice for an 18 GB disk. I'm pretty sure that PC Exchange will allow a Mac OS 8 system to format a SCSI drive in "DOS Format." And since that file system is so prolific, I'd wager that A/UX would support it as well (though I don't have any first hand experience with it).

Good luck,
Drew

» Read the 5300 FAQ: http://www.alksoft.com/5300_FAQ/
Join the Resistance! Enlist in the PowerPC Macintosh Liberation Army!

login or register to post comments

In one partition?

Submitted by IceCap on April 14, 2006 - 4:31am.

Assuming that A/UX can read FAT16 (which for some reason I doubt, but I'll look into it), is the maximum partition size then the same as the maximum HFS OS 8.1 can handle?
For some reason I seem to remember an extension that would allow Mac OS to read UFS, and I'm pretty sure A/UX can read that.

Thanks

IC

»
login or register to post comments
Jon's picture

There is a UFS extension, but

Submitted by Jon on April 14, 2006 - 5:16am.

There is a UFS extension, butt I'm pretty sure it came with DVD stuff. I don't know when it would have gotten into MacOS, but it'd be around OS 8.5/6 or so. I'm not sure if 8.1 would have it.

» I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. - Fritz Perls

login or register to post comments
Eudimorphodon's picture

HFS and A/UX

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on April 14, 2006 - 8:48pm.

Just as a random aside, well... there's an interesting factoid you should keep in mind when discussing filesystems shared between A/UX and MacOS: So far as I recall from playing with it, the UNIX part of A/UX *only* understands its version of UFS. *It doesn't even really understand HFS*

The MacOS virtual machine which runs on top of A/UX directly controls access to HFS volumes. Thus you can't, for instance open a terminal and "ls" your Mac drive. UFS gets abstracted by the OS for the virtual machine, allowing you to use the finder to drag items between the two worlds, etc, but that's it. So for all practical purposes you're limited to either abstracted UFS, or filesystems supported by MacOS 7.0, which is basically HFS, HFS, or HFS. (HFS with a 2GB per-partition limit and gigantic clusters on large drives, none the less.)

And, of course, it gets worse. The version of UFS supported by A/UX has a 4GB-per-partition limit. (It was actually 2GB before 3.1. This was a very common issue on ancient UNIXes. After that was fixed in a lot of them a 2GB maximum file size limit stuck around much longer.) So even if you could read UFS from MacOS you'd still be stuck with little partitions.

So, well, in other words, you'd best accept that A/UX isn't what you want for your gigantic fileserver. Sorry.

--Peace

»
login or register to post comments

Say it isn't so ....

Submitted by IceCap on April 17, 2006 - 3:04am.

Thanks E.

That's kind of disappointing. I thought those old UNIXes were able to handle almost anything you threw at them. The issue of A/UX (minus the Mac OS part) not being able to handle HFS I had read. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised about the UFS. I thought I'd read somewhere that the UFS that MacOS X uses is maybe not proprieatary but I believe it is somewhat modified (?).
I guess I will just have it dual boot but A/UX will not be able to access the 4x18GB HDs (formatted with HFS+). At least I'll have the PPC upgrade, a SCSI card (Jackhammer, the SiliconExpress I got had been modded and it doesn't work), and eventually maxed out RAM and VRAM. Maybe I'll also get the PowerPump that is being offered on eBay.
BTW, the A/UX ignores the PPC upgrade card in the PDS slot.

Man, that s****.

Thanks

IC

»
login or register to post comments