Re: HFS for Parted: User experience

[address@hidden]

Thank for your experience :)

Well, I can't use hfsck source code and put it into parted,
because
it's under APSL license, and Parted is under GPL. They are
incompatible.
Anyway I'm reading the filesystem specifications again and again
to write my own sanity check one day...
But right now my priority is to write a clean maintenable
and safe
code with automated test and so on...
I've just fixed the Ardis Tech patch for newfs_hfs, which
was incorrect
for wrapped HFS and incompatible with 2.4 kernels, 
I now have to identify an incompatibility problem
between my implementation and the Linux one. Anyway I found that
both HFS and HFS+ linux driver contains some dangerous bugs,
so I
guess I'll have to correct their code as well...

(and I have to work for school also :/)

Thanks again,
Guillaume Knispel

----
I'm trying to install Linux onto a Mac PowerBook G4, by
resizing the
existing HFS+ partition that contains MacOS X.3 (Panther),
so I can
create Linux partitions nearby.  This is a brand-new machine
that we
bought from Apple last weekend, and which has never even run
the MacOS
beyond the point where it starts asking for configuration
stuff.  So
far I have not found a "bootable" version of anything that
can do this
partition resize.

I've tried the binary parted-1.6.5 that comes in the Gentoo
2004.0 PPC
release.  It is reputed to have HFS+ resize code in it
(though the
version message doesn't get patched to identify this!).  The
Gentoo
LiveCD barely boots on this hardware (I have to work it past
several
startup problems, I'm not sure why), but I can get a shell
that has
the CD mounted, giving me access to that version of parted.
 But when
I run it, I get:

(parted) print
...
9         0.891  38154.371  hfs+        Untitled
(parted) resize 9 0.891 10000 
No implementation: Support for checking hfs+ file systems is
not implemented yet.

So, it seems that without "check" support written, the code
you have made
for resizing is not useful.  Am I wrong?

Hmm -- yes, I am wrong.  I booted the MacOSX and forced
myself to
endure entering false answers to innumerable personal
questions, so it
would deliver the answers to Apple as soon as I connect to the
Internet, otherwise it would not let me get to the Finder. 
Then I was
able to shut down MacOSX cleanly.  Then upon a reboot,
parted did the
resize in less than a minute.  Upon a further reboot into
MacOSX,
it booted up fine, and (after I figured out how to set a root
password), fsck reported no errors on the HFS+ filesystem.

Perhaps the code in parted's resize command should print a
message, e.g.
"Checking partition before resizing, because it was not shut
down cleanly."
before trying to run the check function.

(I noticed that even in your latest patch 10, there is no
function for
doing the "check" command in the hfs_ops and hfsplus_ops
vectors.  I
wonder if the sources for the Apple fsck_hfs command can be
integrated
into your Parted patches.  Are they free software?  Hmm, it
appears
that they appear in OpenDarwin, here:

 
http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/cvs-src-all/2003-April/003888.html
)

Andrew, I definitely recommend including the HFS/HFS+ patch
into GNU Parted.
It worked for me.  

        John Gilmore


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