Sector - HFS Disk Image Creator & Editor for modern macOS

[davecom]

Hi All,
I released a new little Mac app called Sector for creating and editing HFS disk images on modern macOS (11.5+). This is to make it easier to work with disk images on your modern Mac for emulators like mini vMac and Basilisk II, or virtual disk devices like Blue SCSI, Zulu SCSI, and Floppy Emu.

You can learn more about it here:

Sector

Sector is a raw HFS disk image editor and creator for virtual disk devices like Blue SCSI, Zulu SCSI, and Floppy Emu and emulators like Mini vMac, Basilisk II, and SheepShaver. You can use it to create and edit HFS disk images including transferring files in and out of the disk image.

oaksnow.com

And here are five promo codes for a free copy on the Mac App Store for this great community:

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Please make sure to backup any disk images with valuable data before editing them with Sector. Sector comes with no guarantee that a bug won't hurt your data! Any edits you make to disk image with Sector are irreversible.

 

[eharmon]

Neat! A GUI for hfsutils is quite handy and HFVExplorer only works on Windows. Does this support both unpartitioned (emulator) and partitioned disks?

Building in pdisk as well to allow for advanced partitioning would really be a killer app for a drag-and-drop tool for ease of use.

It's great this is open source, might I suggest a repo link on the website? Sometimes you've got to make a buck and I think source-without-binaries is a reasonable line, but it might encourage more contributions if it's less buried .

 

[davecom]

Neat! A GUI for hfsutils is quite handy and HFVExplorer only works on Windows. Does this support both unpartitioned (emulator) and partitioned disks?

Building in pdisk as well to allow for advanced partitioning would really be a killer app for a drag-and-drop tool for ease of use.

It's great this is open source, might I suggest a repo link on the website? Sometimes you've got to make a buck and I think source-without-binaries is a reasonable line, but it might encourage more contributions if it's less buried .

Thanks for the feedback.

It will detect if a disk image has more than one HFS partition and let you select between them. If a disk image has multiple partitions but only one is HFS it will automatically just open the HFS partition.

Note that it is not compatible/safe to use with disks that have HFS+ partitions.

 

[Juror22]

Looking forward to trying this out and finding out more about it!
Thank you so much for making this available, and also for the additional HFS+ warning.

 

[Scorpio_ny]

Thank you very much for this utility! Going to try it out some of my BlueSCSI images.

 

[akator70]

This looks excellent, I'm looking forward to using it. Thank you!

 

[adespoton]

Set Blessed Folder​

More than one System Folder on your bootable disk image? Sector can change which one is “blessed” or the one to boot of of. Note that Sector cannot create bootable disk images, only edit them.

I'm curious about this: Disk Jockey can create bootable disk images, but can't edit the boot partition.

Disk Jockey

Disk Jockey, a disk image file maker for your retro stuff

diskjockey.onegeekarmy.eu

Any plans to do what Disk Jockey does and create driver/boot partitions as well?

 

[davecom]

I'm curious about this: Disk Jockey can create bootable disk images, but can't edit the boot partition.

Disk Jockey

Disk Jockey, a disk image file maker for your retro stuff

diskjockey.onegeekarmy.eu

Any plans to do what Disk Jockey does and create driver/boot partitions as well?

For now, no unfortunately. I believe making it bootable would require creating a special partition for the Apple SCSI disk driver and including it in the partition and I don't know the legality around that (distributing Apple's disk drivers). So, not something on the road map for now.

Here's what you can do with Sector though. In the Finder, take an existing bootable disk image, make a copy of it. Open it with Sector (Sector will not hurt its boot-ability), then add System Folder(s) and set the one that you want blessed. But it does mean you need at least one bootable image as a starting "graft."

 

[adespoton]

For now, no unfortunately. I believe making it bootable would require creating a special partition for the Apple SCSI disk driver and including it in the partition and I don't know the legality around that (distributing Apple's disk drivers). So, not something on the road map for now.

Here's what you can do with Sector though. In the Finder, take an existing bootable disk image, make a copy of it. Open it with Sector (Sector will not hurt its boot-ability), then add System Folder(s) and set the one that you want blessed. But it does mean you need at least one bootable image as a starting "graft."

Interesting; I've done a bit of searching, and it looks like everyone has kept their drivers proprietary. So the best solution appears to be something along the lines of grabbing the driver included with System 7.5.3 redistributable images and creating a new disk image containing that driver partition and an empty HFS partition. A bit of an annoying hack, and there's no guarantee the driver will work with older/newer OS versions.

Maybe the ability to select an existing image to copy its driver partition and create a new HFS partition would work?