I recently mounted the disk from my MacSE in my Linux PC. The cool thing is that I did not had to open the Mac case; I mounted the drive in situ.

Stuff you will need :

- a SCSI card in your PC that can have his ID setted either by jumper or by software. I used an AVA-1505; a cheap ISA card formely bundled with scanner.

- A SCSI cable DB25 on one end (the Mac end) with the appropriate connector for your SCSI card on the other hand (in my case, a DB25 too). DO NOT USE A PARALLEL CABLE.

- A Linux distribution that include the hfs filesystem module. It came standard in most distro; my Debian testing have them.

Here are the step :

1. Connect the SCSI from your card to the SCSI port of your Mac. Start the Mac.

2. Have your SCSI card module (driver) loaded. For my AVA-1505, I did :

modprobe aha152x aha152x=0x340,12,5

where 0x340 is the IO port of my card (0x330 is another common value), 12 is the IRQ (setted by jumper on the card) and 5 is the SCSI ID to use for the controller. On probe success, you will see a list of SCSI device on the chain. That should include the Mac HD.

3. Create a suitable mount point for your Mac disk :

mkdir /mnt/mac

4. Mount the disk :

mount -t hfs /dev/sda /mnt/mac

assuming that your Mac disk is the first (or only) on the chain (/dev/sda). People familiar with Linux will notice that we did not qualify the partition we want to mount (such as /dev/sda1, for example). The reason for this is simple. Linux does not recognize Mac partition table, so the hfs module just need to be told the device. If you need to mount a specific partition on your Mac disk, please read section 2.8 of http://www-sccm.stanford.edu/Students/hargrove/HFS/README-2.html

4. cd /mnt/mac, and here you go !

A strange thing is that file and folder created from Linux won't be seen by MacOS 6 until I reboot the Mac. I dont know about other MacOs version. This is probably a disk buffer issue.

If you are running Debian, there are a few package you may want to install. If you have apt correctly configured, do the following commands :

apt-get install mcvert
apt-get install macutils
apt-get install hfsutils

Hope that would help someone !

Phil

68k Macintosh Liberation Army Forums

© 2001-2003 68kMLA