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View Full Version : How to view files on a mac floppy disk?



kn2user
11-23-2004, 06:49 PM
I have two mac floppy disk from when I was in high school. I remember I have some files on the floppies that could come in hand now for my college paper that I am writing. I was wondering if I could use Knoppix 3.6 to view and get these files to a windows floppy.

If this is possible, how can this be done?

eon
11-23-2004, 11:49 PM
I am a long time mac user and have not been successful with this myself.
You need to enable hfs read and write in the linux filesystem. There are modules to do this but although I have them and can modprobe them I stll can't read an hfs filesystem.
However the procedure to install hfs support is; apt-get install hfsplus and apt-get install hfsutils. ( I have also read that hfs support is built into the later kernels i.e since 2.4. anyway, but if that's true how does one mount the filesystem?) Then you need, I think, to create a seperate floppy device & fstab entry for the hfs floppy.
Let me know how you make out with this perhaps someone else can help too-or if someone can point out what I'm doing wrong-GREAT!
I think there are not that many mac users who also use x86 linux. So it seems, to me, there has never been much interest in the mac platform here.

eco2geek
11-24-2004, 08:55 AM
I'm using Kanotix (a Knoppix variant), and the "hfsutils" package is already installed. Dunno about Knoppix.

To mount an HFS-formatted floppy:
$ hmount /dev/fd0

(Guess what the command is to unmount it?)

To get a directory listing of the floppy you just "mounted" (actually, it's not mounted in the traditional sense; you access it with these "h" commands):
$ hls
$ hls -la

Other useful commands: (You can probably guess what they do)
hcopy
hdel
hformat
hcd

See the man page for "hfsutils" for more information.

AFAIK they have to be 1.44M disks. IIRC the Mac floppy drives that read and wrote 720K floppies was not compatible with PC floppy drives.

eon
11-24-2004, 07:09 PM
The "h" commands are very interesting. I can mount a hfs cd using it BUT I can't view or list it.
The hls command and other don't seem to work right for my cd.

root@ixan:/home/jon# hmount /dev/scd0
/dev/scd0: contains 1 HFS partition
Volume name is "iPhoto Library" (locked)
Volume was created on Wed Dec 31 19:56:08 1969
Volume was last modified on Wed Dec 31 19:56:08 1969
Volume has 0 bytes free
root@ixan:/home/jon# hls /dev/scd0
hls: "/dev/scd0": no such file or directory

Thanks though I've gotten farther than I had before. I do think that I'll end up copying the files I want in an older mac to dos formatted floppies and then reading them in linux.