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Here is what other people have said about hfsutils:

19-Oct-2005 Ola Lundgren
Used hfsutils-3.2.6 with OpenBSD/sparc64 3.6 on a Sun Ultra 1 to mount a SCSI harddrive from a Mac. Works like a charm! Tried hfsutils on Solaris 9 on a Sparcstation 5, didn't work out for reasons that have already been adressed on this page.

29-Oct-2004 Markus Strangl
I just built hfsutils on Solaris 8 (sparc) because I needed to transfer files off a Mac CD-ROM to ISO.. and guess what? It worked great! :) (after I figured I had to disable the Solaris volume management to make /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0 available to user programs..) Compilation yielded a huge load of incompatible pointer warnings.. you might to take a look into that some day..

20-Apr-2004 Sean Meacher (sean@gongbong.com)
I've got a couple of mac format CD's full of AIFF files that I'm trying to copy over to linux. Having them show up as .bin files isn't too much of a problem, but some files have asterisks at the end of the filename (mac side, represents different 'takes', eg 'Chorus.tk 10****') and these are being converted to 8.3 format (eg CHORU~XI.BIN ). Is there anything I can do about this?

14-Dec-2003 Emmanuel Vasilakis
Great software, just had some problems with Greek characters, and filenames with / , but those are understandable. Anyway, nice work people.

15-Jun-2003 Jim Lemon
(No comments.)

05-May-2003 Patrik Schindler (poc@baden-online.de)
Hello, very nice piece of software. Unfortunately hcopy doesn't understand AppleDouble as Resource format. So netatalk style directory structures aren't fully accessible, which would help me greatly to move from rather buggy netatalk to OS X as file server. Keep goin'!

01-Feb-2003 will (will_kranz@softhome.net)
Oh stupid me, My mistake. After a day and a half learning more than I wanted to about accessing Zip drives in raw mode and how hfsutils works, I find my mistake. 'hmount /dev/sda' works fine I was doing 'hmount /dev/sda4' which works with my Win9x formated disks, but the NOT the Mac Guest formated ones which apparently really have a partition table. Live and learn. How nice it works.... Thank you

30-Jan-2003 will (will_kranz@softhome.net)
Hello: Just getting into this cause I am interested in my old MacPlus. hfsutils worked just great on a linux box for accessing the 1.44Mb floppy and creating disks a SE could read. Nice job. BUT, there is always a but somewhere. What I really wanted to do was use an Iomega Zip 100 disk as a 'hard' drive on the MacPlus. Looks like one can read/write and format the Zip 100 on a Mac with Iomegas tools, but hfsutils doesn't recognize the partition table of such a Zip disk. Conversely if I use hformat, the Mac doesn't recognize the resulting disk. Has anyone looked at this? Know what is different in the Iomega format? Pointers would be welcome. Will

18-Jun-2002 Anonymous
(No comments.)

18-Jun-2002 Anonymous
(No comments.)

20-May-2002 Alx (doesnot@matter.spam)
Any sight on HFS+ support yet? I just came over to Linux from the Mac. On my Mac I went with HFS+ since it was the most advanced filing system. I never realized that it would be difficult to access data on HFS+ partitions from within Linux :-((

04-Mar-2002 jia lin wu (macgqart@64.hinet.net)
(No comments.)

19-Oct-2001 Anonymous
(No comments.)

26-Aug-2001 stax
Using solaris 7 and tk/tcl8.3 I found xhfs did not work.I copied libtcl8.3.so and libtk8.3.so to /usr/lib ( a soft link should work as well) and then I was off to the races. Thanks for the progie.

08-Aug-2001 Anonymous
(No comments.)

08-Aug-2001 Anonymous
(No comments.)

29-Jul-2001 Sohinee Chattopadhyay (csohinee@hotmail.com)
Hello, I would like to know about Macintosh,especially about Zip Disks,could you refer me a website. Thanks Sohinee Chattopadhyay

17-Apr-2001 Morten (BOFH@eurosport.com)
Hi Any progress with making the HFS reader able to access HFS+ volumes??? /BOFH

03-Apr-2001 Anonymous
(No comments.)

03-Apr-2001 Anonymous
(No comments.)

28-Feb-2001 Alois Steindl (Alois.Steindl@tuwien.ac.at)
Hello, today I tried your utilities to transfer some tar.gz files from a backup disk (created on a NeXT on an hfs file system) to disk. The copy was performed and I reformatted the disk to DOS FAT32. After that I tried to list the contents of the files, but tar told me, that the files were not gzip files. Looking at the files with emacs displayed strings like "[Integral]", which were created by hcopy, assuming that the files are text files. Now I tried to convert the files back to binary, but I see no way to do that. All copies from Unix files to hfs files leave the files 'as is', whithout converting back. I don't think there is any damage (had 2 Backups), but would be interested to know of a simple way to repair the files. Best regards Alois

22-Feb-2001 Jon Laughton (jon@eoin.demon.co.uk)
Solaris 2.4 + xhfs + Tcl7.6/Tk4.2 = Cor! Wonderful! Solaris 2.6 + xhfs + Tcl8.1/Tk8.0 = Core Dumps! Shame.

16-Oct-2000 John Robbins (jrobbins@ziplink.net)
I'm one of those users who switched to HFS+ and discovered (too late!) that the hfsutils were unable to access HFS+ formatted drives. I am not very keen on switching back to HFS and so I hope that there are gurus working to solve this problem. Otherwise, I'm restricted to using LinuxDisks from the Mac side to move files back and forth--not a solution I'm very thrilled with.

20-Sep-2000 **** Cameron (jled@dot.com.au)
Your site is a bit hard to use as you have all(Could only be 1) you downloads it weird places rather than all on one page.

18-Sep-2000 Andrea Dalseno (nspme9220@mclink.it)
I cannot mount the second session in a multisession HFS CD! I can only mount the first session and it works fine, but I know there are other sessions on the CD, but there is no way to reach them. If I try to hmount the cd with a parameter 1,2 ... I get an error. If I ask for the info on the CD the program reports that there is only one partition, but it is not true. Is there any way to know if a CD has multiple session?(The one I'm trying with I know for sure, because I was there when it was created) How can I mount the other session? If I can, of curse. Thanks, Remove nsp from the address for reply

12-Sep-2000 Pirre (kbr@sjca.edu.eu.org)
Some questions: is there a difference wether I mount with hmount/humount or mount -t hfs? I have some trouble to execute files on my macintosh, copied with hfsutils to a floppy. Are there 'executable' flags for a file? I looked at hattrib, but I couldn't find out how it works, please some info on TYPE and ATTRIBUTES. Kind regards, Pirre.

08-Sep-2000 Corey Clingo (clingo@republic.net)
I first tried the Windows port on Win2K, with little luck. Then I got the (latest) Unix version from here and it works great on my OpenBSD 2.7 (Intel) box. Should've known better ;-) I am able to read my one and only Mac CD, but I also have a so-called "self-mounting image" file I need to read. Is there any way to do that with hfsutils? Thanks for a nice util, Corey

31-Aug-2000 Sebastian (Goridis@mschumacher.com)
(No comments.)

25-Aug-2000 Nicolas Warren (nick@kagan.com)
I've been experimenting with HFS utilities on win32 to build virtual HFS partitions for creating HFS native CD's for submission to our service bureau (the burners are on PC's, the graphics people work on macs, and we get files from them via a common SaMBa server). It's working well for us. I was wondering, though, if the authoer or anyone reading the feedback page knows anything about the format used by PC Exchange to store finder info and resource forks in the resource.frk folder. The mac access the server using Dave, a utility that let's macs use SMB shares. It treats the volumes like it would any non-HFS compatible medium, that is, it writes the datafork to the destination file, and sticks finder info and the resource fork, if any, in an identically named folder in resource.frk. I'd like to write a utility that copies and repackages these split files into macbinary, where hfs utilities can import them into an HFS parition with info and resources intact. I've found plenty of information on MacBinary format (as well as binhex) but nothing in PC Exchange format. There's a few things you can tell just by looking at the files (where the true name and type/creator signatures are), but other than that I haven't figured anything out yet. If I can write a handler for resource.frk support, it might be something useful to add in a future HFS utilities release.

21-Jul-2000 Anonymous
(No comments.)

21-Jul-2000 Florian (flo@fxb.de)
hcopy always adds the extension .bin when I copy files from an hfs volume. e.g. it transforms f EPSF/8BIM 33939 1999622 Nov 5 1999 pic1 f TIFF/8BIM 12198 1452254 Mar 8 13:37 pic2 to pic1.bin and pic2.bin, not pic1.esp/pic2.tif. I have to copy several thousands files and need the file extension. How can I do that?

02-Jul-2000 Bob Castles (castles@teleport.com)
I've got a bunch of MAC disks made at different times on different systems over the last 15 years. Some are on DS/DD disks and some on DS/HD. XHFS or HFS open the HD disks but not the DD ones. I get the message that the size is <800K and therefore not useable. It't true, they are 720K disks but from my understanding of the bizarre world of Apples, 720K=800K. Any suggestions?

19-May-2000 Gottfried Barthel (Gottfried.Barthel@fmi.uni-konstanz.de)
Hi Rob, thanks for providing that great tool. Version 3.2 has been installed on our SUN LAN; I use it for data transfer between my private Mac and a SUN in my office via floppies. This is much more convenient than having to pass via DOS-formatted floppies as intermediate step, it even works with conversion of 8bit-characters (this is important for European languages). Here are two questions/suggestions/comments: 1) If a file has been created after the browser has been started, then it is not shown in the browser window. In order to access such a file, what I do is to leave the current directory and then return. I would appreciate a "Refresh" button for such a situation. 2. The DOS/UNIX/Mac line ending nightmare: I happen to receive (Plain) TeX files created on a DOS box. TeX on the SUN deals with them nicely, but after transferring the TeX file to the Mac, all these DOS CR/LF cause the file to appear on the Mac with every second line blank, to the effect that TeX cannot handle the text properly - you get one-line paragraphs, and as soon as you come across a line end within display math mode, TeX gets totally confused. So far, I am using a simple Emacs keyboard macro to remove these blank lines on the Mac. It would of course be much more convenient if that problem could be dealt with during the transfer. Regards from Konstanz (Germany), Gottfried Barthel, Mathematik, Univ. Konstanz

30-Mar-2000 Will Dukes (dukeswj0@sewanee.edu)
Great program, I installed it on linuxppc with no problem and have started to use it with the mac partition of my hard drive, but I'm having one weird problem. When I ask for a directory listing in my root directory, it only lists the first set of files and stops around "e." Also, not too sure how to change directories into a directory with a space in the name. When I type the name with the space hcd thinks I'm giving it more arguments. Any help would be appreciated and thanks again for the utility.

17-Feb-2000 Wiktor (bwiktor@hotmail.com)
Sorry,this isn't a good feedback. It's a problem. I cannot get the HFS utils. While my PC is getting contents,peer(server) closes session! The best problem fix is to put utils to HTTP protocol.

11-Jan-2000 Harald Sundt (hsundt3@eugn.uswest.net)
I used HFS utils happily on SUSE on my old laptop, but my new laptop uses RedHat and I tried downloading the tar gz but can't get tar to recognize it. I am a newbie,... what command should I use to install? Thanks PS. SUSE supplies rpms, but I'm scared to use theirs here.

23-Nov-1999 Joseph Hinchcliffe (JHinch2206@aol.com)
(No comments.)

25-Oct-1999 robert crecine (robert@chickenfarm.org)
Thanks! well done, really. Hope HFS+ is progressing to your liking.

02-Oct-1999 Michael (edvtrainer@hotmail.com)
Great Work, makes Linux even more integrative. Thank You for all the hours of programming!

29-May-1999 Roy Marantz (marantz@rci.rutgers.edu)
I love this suit of programs. I use it for sneaker-net all the time. I've one problem, although I can transfer .sea files fine, .hqx file always get "Sorry, hqx file header not found (invalid argument)" I looked at the source and it seems to print that out when hcopy gets EOF while looking for the header in the file. od(1) shows there are non-null bytes at the start of the file and the linux file command recognizes the file as StuffIt Archive (data) : T! Any ideas? Thanks.

19-May-1999 François-Marie BILLARD (francois-marie.billard@wanadoo.fr)
HFS util is very nice program for me. Now i would know where can i find a software for uncompress MAcintosh file (type PACT) compress with CPCT on a power PC. The file have been segmented. Thank's .

19-Apr-1999 Brendan Rankin (rankin@indigo.ie)
I am using hfsutils 3.2 with RedHat 5.1 Linux. I have been having trouble mounting hfs zip disks however. Is there any peculiarity I should be aware of? Brendan.

24-Feb-1999 Dr. Hai-Ru Chang (hrc@monsoon.colorado.edu)
Hello Robert, Thank you for developing such a nice tool for us to use. Can you help me to solve the following two problems? 1. When I use 'hcopy -r' to copy a UNIX file to a HFS volume, the undersocre '_' character in the UNIX filename becomes a space character in the corresponding HFS filename. Is there any way to keep the underscore character. 2. After I used the hcopy command, my Macintosh will not mount the medium. Look like the header sector has some problems. Do I need do anything after the command 'hcopy'? Thank you very much! Sincerely, Hai-Ru Chang

12-Dec-1998 Jason Staloff (jstaloff@libertynet.org)
Thanks for making this tool available. It was one of the standard packages installed on my PowerMac with MkLinux DR3 (I'm using it with KDE with no problems). I'm really looking forward to support for HFS+!

08-Dec-1998 Brian Miller (miller125@llnl.gov)
Compiled and installed 3.2.6 on Solaris. The configure step went much smoother than last version: Tcl8.1a2, and Tk8.1a2 were found without problems, no editing of files needed, etc. No other problems found. This is a useful program for me because I haven't figured out how to ftp to our network from home through the security layer and I do like to take some work home occasionally. Thanks for providing such a useful utility. Brian

13-Sep-1998 Itai Tavor (itavor@vic.bigpond.net.au)
Compiled on NetBSD/mac68k 1.3.2, tcl/tk version 8.0. The installer failed to find tcl.h and tk.h, I ended up moving them to where the installer was looking. Have a problem with xhfs and multiple partitions. "hmount /dev/sd0c 1" successfully mounts HFS partition 1, but the xhfs Open dialog won't accept a partition number so I can't open anything. Is there a special syntax for specifying a partition number in xhfs? Thanks for a very useful tool!

I made a few more changes to the way ``configure'' locates Tcl/Tk header files. I hope they help.

``xhfs'' is unfortunately not able to handle partition numbers in its current form. There's no good reason for this; I just haven't bothered to fix it yet. Hopefully I will soon, or else someone will contribute patches. -rob

02-Sep-1998 Hermann J. Beckers (dvamt_kreis_steinfurt@tonline.de)
Hello Rob, I've compiled the hfsutils on AIX 4.1.5. The IBM-rs6k- machines are unable to read the Mac-800K floppies as You stated in the manpages. But you can copy the contents with a simple "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=macimage" and use the imagefile. I think, it should work on other systems as well. hth hjb

This is not very intuitive; if hfsutils is unable to read the floppy directly, I don't understand how dd could. Have you actually done this? There must be something to explain it. -rob

14-Aug-1998 Martyn Hemming (mh-5060@mail.necgroup.co.uk)
HFS available to NT? Wow, this should be good (get Mac CDs all the time). Except it isn't. I've followed the setup in the manual. But it just refuses to accept any Mac CDs.

hmount: E:: read nonexistent logical block (I/O error)

This could be related to a problem that was fixed in the 3.2 release of hfsutils; you may have to wait until the author of the Windows NT port has a chance to make a new release incorporating the fix. -rob

30-Jun-1998 elegna (elegna@hol.fr)
I can't mount a cdrom under windows 95 An error occurs :

C:\HFSUTILS>rsxhfs hmount e:
hmount: E:: error closing medium (No such file or directory)

Unfortunately, I don't have a well enough understanding of Windows 95 to diagnose what's happening in this case. I can only suggest that you refer this problem to the author of the port in question (the Win95/NT port was done by Marcus Better.) -rob

13-May-1998 kazunori Miura (kazumio@st.rim.or.jp)
Hello! I can compile on NetBSD for mac68k. (using patches from FreeBSD) xhfs is very usefull! Thank you !

12-May-1998 ZachLeber (zach@radionics.com)
I had problems with the configure script trying to validate my Tcl and Tk libraries. I think the internal compilation test was missing other necessary libraries (such as dld and m) so failed to recognize the path I gave it. I had to hard code the TCLLIBS and TKLIBS in the Makefile. I am using HP-UX 9.05 and Tcl 7.6 and Tk 4.2.

Newer releases of hfsutils are hopefully getting better at identifying Tcl and Tk installations. -rob

21-Feb-1998 Pat Ward (versa@xnet.com)
I've built 3.2 on Redhat 5.0 TCL8.0 Linux Alpha. Thanks!! I was not able to get previous versions built. It's a fine thing.

20-Feb-1998 Scott Davis (davis@wv.ewa.com)
I have an old SCSI I Quantum hard drive 80 Mb that is currently formatted for an Amiga. I want to use the drive in a Mac II but the MAC does not see the drive. Apparently I have to put an HFS filesystem on it or is there more too it such as partitioning and putting some Mac system files on it. I saw your tools and have Linux 2.0.30 running on a Pentium 233. Can I put the hard drive in the pentium scsi chain (SCSI-2) and format the hard drive with hformat or is there another solution.

You will need to (1) repartition the disk with an Apple partition map, (2) install an Apple device driver on the disk into a partition designated for this purpose, and finally (3) format one or more partitions with HFS volumes.

Apple's own HD Setup program should be able to do (1) and (2) for you. The hfsutils can do (1) but not (2); you may still be able to use such a disk, but you probably won't be able to make it bootable. Finally, once the disk has an Apple partition map with at least one HFS partition, either hfsutils or the MacOS Finder should be able to create an HFS volume for you (3).

To do (1) and (3) with hfsutils, you will need to use the ``hfs'' shell. For details, refer to the man pages: particularly hfssh(1) for the commands hfs zero and hfs mkpart, and hfs(1) for format. -rob

20-Feb-1998 David Cougle (thyle@moonman.com)
I installed hfsutils but not hfs, I don't seem to have xhfs, am I supposed to install hfs too? I was hoping i could get away with just hfsutils:)

Don't confuse hfsutils with Paul Hargrove's HFS kernel module for Linux. You don't need one to use the other, although hfsutils does provide some useful functionality by allowing you to format new HFS volumes.

To get the ``hfs'' and ``xhfs'' programs, you must have Tcl and Tk installed on your system, and you must provide some additional options to ``configure'' when you build the utilities. The README file in the distribution provides all the details. -rob

19-Feb-1998 Duncan Haldane (f.d.m.haldane@mci2000.com)
Thanks for sending me the correction to suid.c in hfsutils-3.1, which fails to compile as is with -DHAVE_CONFIG, because of a missing include statement.

I got your pre-release hfsutils-3.1.1 from the testing subdirectory on your ftp site (which has a corrected suid.c) to work, on RedHatlinux 5.0.

One point: until I manually changed the installed /usr/local/bin/xhfs to be setuid (with chmod -s) it would only mount macintosh disks as Readonly (unless I was root). Maybe you could document the need to do this in your README, for the less sophisticated of us! (I was puzzled for a while).

These look like extremely useful utilities! Thanks for your work!

Although the utilities are made to be setuid-aware and take some minimal precautions to avoid potential security problems, they are really not designed to be installed in such a manner, and could possibly pose a risk to your system if so installed.

The reason your volumes were mounted read-only is probably because your user ID did not have write-permission to the device file corresponding to the volume (for example, /dev/fd0). Making the program setuid may have avoided the problem by overriding the permissions, but it would be far better to solve the problem by adjusting the permissions so that you have write access to the device.

Don't blindly make the device world-writable, either. The best approach is probably to make the device group-writable, and add yourself and any other appropriate users to that group. For example:

brw-rw----   1 root     floppy     2,   0 Sep 17 13:51 /dev/fd0

You may need to create an appropriate group, such as ``floppy'' or ``cdrom'' but once created, you can add as many people to the group as necessary.

As an alternative, you could make the utilities setgid (not setuid) to the same group, and avoid having to add users to the group. This is better than making the utilities setuid root, since it gives them only enough permission to open and write to the device file, and nothing more.

I will add a note to the distribution explaining this in more detail. Thanks. -rob

12-Jan-1998 Anonymous
Is it possible to hmount zip disks? I would like to share ZIP disks formatted on Mac on Sun.

In general, yes, but for Solaris, unfortunately no. Macintosh Zip (and Jaz) disks can be accessed with hfsutils the same as any other media. You will need to specify the block device file corresponding to your (entire, non-partitioned) drive -- and herein lies the problem for Solaris: unless your medium has a Sun partition table, you can't access it in the normal way. See also some of my more recent comments, above. -rob

28-Dec-1997 Amitai Schlair (amitai.schlair@usa.net)
With hfsutils 3.1 on OpenBSD (and 2.0 on NetBSD), things work great to begin with. After the first few hmounts, though, I start getting "mode sense returned nonsense; using fictitious geometry" errors, and usually the machine wedges nicely. The HFS volume in question has no problems at all. This is on a Mac IIci, BTW. Any ideas?

This sounds like either an OS or a hardware (SCSI?) issue. I can only suggest you refer it to someone with a better understanding of your hardware and/or OS. -rob

10-Dec-1997 Andrew N delaTorre (adelator@umabnet.ab.umd.edu)
I'd been using hfsutils on my MkLinuxPPC; It worked great until I updated to Mkupdate#6. I reinstalled tcl/tk 7.6 and 4.2. When I try to access hfsuntils I get a message

sh: tk4.2.so /cannot open sharred objects / no file or directory

It sounds like the updated version of MkLinux somehow broke your libraries. Unless the MkLinux team has a better suggestion, perhaps you can build and reinstall the Tcl/Tk libraries yourself. If that doesn't solve it, you might want to try recompiling hfsutils yourself as well. -rob

30-Nov-1997 Lothar Albrecht (Lothar.Albrecht@munich.netsurf.de)
Absolute great stuff. Thanks for your hard work. Lothar

21-Nov-1997 Werner Hoelzl (w.hoelzl@ieee.org)
Thank you for your work! Is there now support for 1024 byte blocks to read HFS on magneto-optical disks ?

You can try recent versions of hfsutils which should be able to read media with any block size. If it doesn't work, please contact me so I can examine the issue and devise a solution. -rob

18-Sep-1997 brad midgley (brad@pht.com)
Any plans to support HFS+ filesystems? HFS+ should be hitting the streets soon, right?

Yes; HFS+ (aka Sequoia or ``Extended Format'') is due for release with Apple's MacOS 8.1. I do have every intention of supporting the new volume format, however because I will have limited access to machines capable of creating HFS+ volumes, I can't predict how soon I might have a usable version ready.

If you would like to help support the development effort (by offering to send HFS+ volume images to me, offering to test pre-release software, or offering to donate hardware) please contact me as soon as possible. -rob

29-Jul-1997 Jim Thomas (jim_t@pobox.com)
Re: partitioning of SCSI disks prior to hformat. One of your earlier answers recommended Macs pdisk utilities for creating the partition table. Will the standard linux fdisk or cfdisk do? Excuse my ignorance as I don't actually have a SCSI disk yet. I want to be able to have a couple, one that I move to a mac. That one I want to be able to format etc. from my linux box. Thanks for the great product!

No, the Linux fdisk and cfdisk utilities don't use or understand Apple's partition table format. Until I add a partitioning utility to hfsutils, I will recommend Apple's pdisk. -rob

15-Jul-1997 Uwe Jendricke (jendricke@aug.ukl.uni-freiburg.de)
Thanks a lot for this very useful package. No problems here using floppy disks to exchange data from powerpc to intel/linux.

11-Jul-1997 Soenke Behrens (sbehrens@bigfoot.com)
Works great, thanks! I'd like to know what hfsck already does and doesn't do, though. I ran hfsck over an HFS partition that has around 30MB used, and reports 166MB used. Looks like a screwed block map (or whatever Apple calls the structure that keeps track of which blocks are used, and by which files). Is hfsck supposed to catch this error? Yours Soenke

hfsck doesn't do much yet, unfortunately. Only a very general framework has been written, and it is currently only capable of fixing very minor problems in an HFS volume's Master Directory Block (MDB).

I hope to be able to do much more work on hfsck soon. -rob

18-Jun-1997 Bethany Clark (BClark@intl.com)
To whom it may concern: Please provide us with a contact name to discuss HFS Utilities' interest in developing a multilingual website. In short, International Communications has provided superior localization and website services. At your earliest convenience, please contact Bethany Clark at BClark@intl.com for further information. Tel: (508)620-3900 ext.322 We look forward to hearing from you.

12-Jun-1997 Stacy Trippe (strippe@mars.tecinfo.com)
Sorry, but docs or man pages don't help. I thought maybe someone could point out my mistakes here. Running under BSDi 3.0, w/ TCL 7.5, TK 4.1, I was able to compile HFS Utilities, successfully. I have a couple of run-time errors that have me perplexed. Running hformat: hformat /dev/fd0 hformat: /dev/fd0: volume size must be >= 800K (Invalid argument) Running xhfs: xhfs Error: can't set "dir(.r)": variable isn't array or xhfs . /dev/fd0 Error: can't set "dir(.l)": variable isn't array

26-May-1997 Stanley Soh (stanley@lycomm.com.sg)
Nice piece of work. Just some feedback on what happened. Acessed a HFS Syquest EZ135 catridge, could read from it without any problem. Did not attempt to write to it. Took a new catridge, format it using hformat, copied some files over to it. Sent it to a colour-seperation firm, but they could not access the catridge. Interestingly enough, it seems to read the first catridge without any problem. So the other company can read catridge A, but not catridge B. I can however read and write to both. The only difference is that cart B was formatted by me using hformat. Perhaps this is something to look into ?

My guess is that hformat formatted the entire cartridge as an HFS volume, ignoring or overwriting any partition information. hfsutils doesn't care if the volume is partitioned or not, but I think most Macs do; a SCSI disk is supposed to contain a partition table.

I haven't written a partition utility for hfsutils yet, but Apple has. If you can recreate a partition table on the cartridge, you can tell hformat to write an HFS volume into a particular partition (rather than the whole disk) by specifying the partition number. See the man page for details. -rob

07-Apr-1997 Eric BELHAIRE (belhaire@ief.u-psud.fr)
It's more a question than I feedback. If somebody already used hfsutils with a Syquest on Sun Solaris 2.5, because I can't make it works. Is this possible, Thanks

17-Mar-1997 Glen Stewart (sysop@associate.com)
Trying to use hfsutils 2.0 on OpenBSD. My CD-ROM's are on the following 7-platter device, and I can't get any platter mounted. Can you suggest a fix? Thanks!

cd0 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 0:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd1 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 1:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd2 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 2:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd3 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 3:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd4 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 4:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd5 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 5:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd6 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 6:  SCSI2 5/cdrom removable

It is difficult to help you without knowing exactly what commands you have tried, and how they failed. -rob

24-Jan-1997 Ralph Brands (brinton@unixg.ubc.ca)
I have MkLinux on a Lacie Joule external HD connected to a 7200. Using

hmount /dev/sda
hcopy -t 'C:filename' /home/brands/filename

hmount /dev/sda
hcopy -t /home/brands/filename 'C:filename'

machine_disk_write_absolute (08:01):device_set status"(ipc/send) invalid destination port"
block_write_reply: rdev 08:00 rsector 08:01: devise_set_status"(ipc/send) invalid destination port"

The problems you are having are almost certainly related to the MkLinux kernel, and not hfsutils per se. I would suggest you forward a description of the problem to the MkLinux developers; see www.mklinux.apple.com for more information. -rob

14-Jan-1997 James B Davis (davis.james@tci.com)
When making and remaking without doing a clean, you need to change the CLITARGETS target so that the link command can fail and it still continue on:

$(CLITARGETS): $(HFSUTIL)
        -ln -f $(HFSUTIL) $@

The release following 1.19b will correct this. Thanks. -rob

09-Dec-1996 Nathan V. Patwardhan (nvp@nfic.com)
Hi, Just wondering my I might be getting the error: "unable to obtain locks for device (Invalid argument)." when trying to mount a Mac-formatted floppy? I cannot mount the device as root or user - naturally this holds true for both hfs and xhfs. BTW, the disk spins for a second then dies. I can also use the File Eject toolbar option to eject the disk without a problem. Hmm. The HFS tools like very uselul, and I'd like to be able to use them. Do you have any suggestions why I am not able to mount a floppy using hmount using /dev/fd0? Sincerely, Nathan V. Patwardhan nvp@nfic.com

Some systems don't seem to support fcntl()-style locking on device files. You will have to add -DNODEVLOCKS to the DEFINES line in the Makefile.

N.B. without locking support a volume can be corrupted by these utilities if two or more processes try to update the volume at the same time. -rob

23-Nov-1996 KingMog (frye@azone.net)
Could you notify me when this product supports tcl 7.5 or higher? My system already has 7.5 installed, but I could use this product Thanks :) KingMog Not a real title, just a self-serving IRC name

Version 1.19b now supports Tcl 7.6 and Tk 4.2. -rob

11-Nov-1996 Simon Hewlett (shewlett@alf2.tcd.ie)
Everything seems to work fine with floppies. When, however, I try to mount my Apple System CD version 7.5.2 (Mac PowerBook with PowerPC UPgrade) I get the message "Sorry, can't mount volume: unsupported block size". Can you please help with this!

As yet, the only block size which hfsutils supports is 512 bytes. If I can obtain a CD which uses a different block size, this restriction may be relaxed in a future version. -rob

18-Oct-1996 Marc Lebas (marc-lebas@calvanet.calvacom.fr)
Congratulation for your stuff (reliability, documentation): my application works fine ! Thanks to you, BeBox users can enjoy with HFS floppies, CD-ROM or syquest.

24-Aug-1996 Steve Cacace (scacace@interport.net)
Can not get the xhfs tcl utilities to complete their makes. Get an ld error The tcl7.4 directory does exist. This was originally a Linux CD live link, but I copied it onto my hard drive. It is linked but all real files now. Error is ->

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/hfsutils-1.17b/libhfs'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/hfsutils-1.17b/libhfs'
gcc -Llibhfs hfssh.o tclhfs.o crc.o binhex.o copyin.o copyout.o  \
        -lhfs -ltcl7.4 -lm  -o hfssh
/usr/i486-linux/bin/ld: cannot open -ltcl7.4: No such file or directory
make: *** [hfssh] Error 1

First check that your library is really named libtcl7.4...; some systems merely need -ltcl to compile.

If you still can't get it to work, you may need to use -L/path/to/your/tcllibs/dir at the beginning of your TCLLIBS in the Makefile to help the compiler find the directory where your library is installed. -rob

18-Aug-1996 Joshua Freier (jdf2026@rit.edu)
These tools are really useful!! I have not tried the most recent release but 1.11b compiled fine using the tcl 7.5 and tk 4.1 libraries.

23-Jul-1996 Nick (biba@general.net)
I am having a lot of trouble getting your HFS Utilities to compile. Please let me know if there is any way I can get an already compiled version? Thank you.

I will consider organizing an archive of hfsutils binaries. At the moment I would only be able to send you Linux i386 ELF, SunOS 4 SPARC, or Digital UNIX Alpha binaries.

Note that some Linux distributions, notably MkLinux, Debian, and Red Hat, already distribute hfsutils as a binary package. -rob

18-Jun-1996 Michael Breuer (mbreuer@majjas.com)
I haven't used this yet, but it seems great... one question... Is there any support for network mounted hfs file systems? I.E. could I now or in the future back up local Mac discs to a unix tape drive?

No, hfsutils is neither an AppleShare client nor an AppleShare server. To serve UNIX files to Macintosh clients, you may be interested in the afpd functionality of netatalk. I am not aware of any freely available AppleShare clients for UNIX at this time. -rob

27-May-1996 Baskaran Subramaniam (baskaran@sol.med.jhu.edu)
Thanks for letting me get hfs utilites for Linux. I have just started playing with MkLinux on my Radius 81/110, a PowerMac 8100/110 clone. I do have a suggestion that, I think, will help other new comers like me. A link to download Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0 that does not come with MkLinux DR1 release! Thanks. Baskaran

Thanks; a link now appears on the hfsutils home page. -rob

21-May-1996 Wayne J. Lyle (lylewj@dpkk.com)
(No comments.)

20-May-1996 Thys Meintjes (s9233091@babel.ee.up.ac.za)
I havn't as yet looked at your thingy but it would be very nice if i could mount mac cds from linux if it can great ! if not maybe something nice to to do. Anyways i dont know if it only a kernal recomp if it is thanks for nice thingys anyway

You can indeed read Macintosh CDs using hfsutils. Since these are user-level tools, no kernel recompilation is necessary. -rob

14-May-1996 Guillem Bernat (dmigbn0@ps.uib.es)
Thanks for provinding that stuff. It is incredibly useful

11-May-1996 Pierre Imbaud (pmi@imaginet.fr)
dunno the package yet. But I sure need it! I've been looking for something like that for months!

09-May-1996 Swift Griggs (admin@genesis.net)
You don't have a link to the file on your page!

I sure hope I do! -rob

04-May-1996 Farul Ghazali (farul@columbia.edu)
Couldn't get it to work under Solaris x86 (IDE CDROM) but I'm going to keep on trying... Keep up the good work.

04-May-1996 Farul Ghazali (farul@columbia.edu)
Can't wait to try this out.

24-Apr-1996 Joshua Freier (jdf2026@rit.edu)
This looks really cool!!! I'd love to try it out but I can't seem to follow your ftp link. Thanks, Joshua

The current FTP distribution site is ftp.mars.org. -rob

19-Apr-1996 Johannes N. Endres (endres@uni-muenster.de)
You've done a great job! I have been looking for a tool like HFS Utilities for a long time. I tried to compile version 1.9b on an IBM RS/6000-250 and succeeded with the command line tools. I could not get the tcl/tk extensions or xhfs to work, which might be my fault since I don't have any experience with X11 programming. A suggestion: I'd like a tool to change a file's type and creator on the disk. regards, Jo

Version 1.17b implements an ``hattrib'' command to do just that. -rob