At 17:24 Uhr -0400 12.8.2001, dman wrote:
On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 04:32:41PM -0400, William T Wilson wrote: | I want to take a Macintosh IDE hard drive (System 8.6), connect it to my | x86 Linux system and read the data off of it. (In a pinch, I could use a | Windows system too, but that looks harder). | | Do I have a prayer? :} Is the hardware compatible? I have no idea since I have never been inside a Mac. If it is an IDE driver you should have no trouble.
The first problem is probably the partition table format. Macs have another partition table format (and use another partitioning tool under linux, called "pdisk" originally and called "mac-fdisk" under debian). I believe you need to compile support for this partitioning format into the kernel. I don't know wether you can do this for x86.
| I've used mtools to read Mac floppies, but as far as I know these are no | use for reading hard drive data. Linux (and mount) understand the Mac filesystem (IIRC it is called "hfs") so reading/writing the disk, once the hardware fits, should be no trouble.
The problem is, that most recent Mac disks are not formatted as hfs, but hfs+ (which is natively supported in MacOS since system 8.1), which is a completely different format. There is no support for hfs+ in the kernel. I believe someone (the original author of the linux hfs driver?) is writing a hfs+ driver since quite a long time and at some point there was a set of userland tools to read hfs+. So that's probably the way to go.
christian.