ISO sample code to create an HFS filesystem or disk image

[eharmon]

There's nothing I would love more than an updated HFVExplorer replacement.

One kooky idea for exploding disks though -- for OS that support FAT disks directly, you could have the user create a FAT image, have the OS deal with translation of data into that FS, and export those files to the external filesystem instead. But while I think that would work, it's getting pretty obtuse. Maybe someone has an idea that could smooth that out.

All that said, even just a set of tools that run anywhere to "put data into a disk" and "take data out of a disk" like turbo-charged hfsutils with a simple UI would be a big improvement. Even if those are just batch operations -- take everything out or put everything in. It might be a reasonable start to reduce the scope. And that would allow someone to save something to a disk image, put the SD card in a modern machine, and run the tools to pull/push data from that disk image pretty easily.

Add a little sugar to have it auto-detect Blue/Zulu/Emu style filenames on external disks and present those as options for import/export, including reading the disk labels, and it'd be pretty handy even if you can't do complex surgery on the filesystem inside.

(If you do do that, I beg for open sourcing! I think you'd find contributors from the various SCSI emulator communities.)

 

[NJRoadfan]

CiderPress2 is cross platform: https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2/

Right now its going to be command line only on anything but Windows, but a cross-platform GUI is possible.

 

[bigmessowires]

CiderPress II tooks very promising! I didn't realize it had added MFS and HFS support.

The proposed feature set seems very ambitious, but if he gets all of that working it'll be awesome. It's targeting eight different filesystems (not just HFS), with eight different disk image formats (not just raw block images), and automatic file conversions of 28 common files types. I was imagining something much simpler, and had viewed file conversion as somebody else's problem to solve - just give me a tool to get the raw files in and out of the disk, and let me deal with the best way to convert my Apple II double hi-res file to PNG or my AppleWorks document to Microsoft Word.

I worry that CiderPress II may suffer from "everything and the kitchen sink" syndrome, where it has so many features it'll never get finished, or it will collapse under the weight of its own complexity. But I suppose time will tell, as it's a new project.

I just downloaded the "self-contained" version of the latest alpha and tried it on my MacBook. Yes it's a command line program, and the installation isn't exactly user-friendly, but it seems to work OK with HFS disk images in my limited testing. I'm sure I'll find more uses for it.