[A/UX] How do I mount existing Mac-formatted volumes within A/UX?

[unxmaal]

How do I mount existing Mac-formatted volumes within A/UX?

I have A/UX running on a SD card via SCSI2SD. 

/ is on /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 (from my memory, so may be wrong).

Volumes for System 7 and 8, "Backups" and "Apps" show up on the A/UX desktop. 

I'm running out of space on /.  I'd like to use, say, "Backups" for more space.

How do I go about determining drive device names for those volumes, and mounting them so that they're directly-accessible to A/UX? 

Is this a totally wrong approach? Should I instead try to reformat one of those volumes and then mount it? My FDD doesn't work, and I haven't been able to get my Floppy Emu to work with the A/UX boot disk image, so I can't run the disk utilities from the A/UX CD. 

 

[Gorgonops]

TL;DR and as strange as it sounds, you can't mount HFS filesystems within A/UX. Full stop. The virtual MacOS environment can see them (A/UX essentially exposes them to the sandbox as raw devices) but the Unix kernel has no idea how to mount them. You'll have to reformat any volumes you want to use natively with A/UX to UFS.

Don't forget that A/UX's version of UFS doesn't work well with partitions over 2GB.

 

[unxmaal]

TL;DR and as strange as it sounds, you can't mount HFS filesystems within A/UX. Full stop. The virtual MacOS environment can see them (A/UX essentially exposes them to the sandbox as raw devices) but the Unix kernel has no idea how to mount them. You'll have to reformat any volumes you want to use natively with A/UX to UFS.

Don't forget that A/UX's version of UFS doesn't work well with partitions over 2GB.

I suspected as much. 

In that case how do I format them from within A/UX? 

I'm not sure how to verify their device names, which I thought I needed for mkfs. 

 

[Gorgonops]

Off the top of my head... no idea. I haven't touched A/UX for like 15 years.

Here's a link to the A/UX 3.x local system administration manual, if there's a solution it's probably in chapter 5:

http://www.tenox.net/books/Apple_A-UX/Apple_A-UX_30_Local_System_Administration.pdf
 

Scanning the chapter... I'm not entirely sure you can just reformat an existing HFS partition. Going off of very vague memories and a quick scan of what's in the manual my impression is that A/UX does some kind of weird off-kilter magic to match Mac disk partitions to the Unix "Slice" concept. It looks like you use the "dp" command to map Mac partition entries to "slice" assignments, but what's not entirely clear to me is if you can take an existing HFS partition and convert it into an A/UX partition within A/UX, or if you have to use the HD setup program to create the partition with the correct type label. If it's the latter I'm not sure you can do that non-destructively?

 

[unxmaal]

Off the top of my head... no idea. I haven't touched A/UX for like 15 years.

Here's a link to the A/UX 3.x local system administration manual, if there's a solution it's probably in chapter 5:

http://www.tenox.net/books/Apple_A-UX/Apple_A-UX_30_Local_System_Administration.pdf
 

Scanning the chapter... I'm not entirely sure you can just reformat an existing HFS partition. Going off of very vague memories and a quick scan of what's in the manual my impression is that A/UX does some kind of weird off-kilter magic to match Mac disk partitions to the Unix "Slice" concept. It looks like you use the "dp" command to map Mac partition entries to "slice" assignments, but what's not entirely clear to me is if you can take an existing HFS partition and convert it into an A/UX partition within A/UX, or if you have to use the HD setup program to create the partition with the correct type label. If it's the latter I'm not sure you can do that non-destructively?

The answer is: nope.

From what I can tell, A/UX can't "see" those volumes at all.

I found a GUI Drive Setup utility in /mac/bin that worked. Destroyed the existing volume and HFS partitions, then partitioned 5GB for A/UX.

 

[Gorgonops]

I suspected that might be the case. It kind of read in the manual that only partitions with A/UX type labels would show up to dp. Oh well.

You did keep the individual partition sizes for the A/UX filesystems under 2GB, right?

(Technically it sounds like you can make them as large as 4GB for anything but the root partition, but there are some things that might not quite work right.)

 

[unxmaal]

I suspected that might be the case. It kind of read in the manual that only partitions with A/UX type labels would show up to dp. Oh well.

You did keep the individual partition sizes for the A/UX filesystems under 2GB, right?

(Technically it sounds like you can make them as large as 4GB for anything but the root partition, but there are some things that might not quite work right.)

Nope, a single 5gb partition. Seems to work great, but we'll see. 

Next is to mount it at /opt . I'm not clear on the differences between mtab and fstab. I'll change it in both places and see if it works. 

 

[Gorgonops]

Digging around it looks like 5GB should be fine for /opt. The 2GB limit is for the / partition; apparently it can't fsck a partition bigger than that during the pre-boot stage.