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Re: Executor/NS and Mac SCSI drives



Dear Folks,

Once NEXTSTEP has gotten a hold of the drive, Executor is out of  
luck.  However, Executor is able to access drives directly without  
NEXTSTEP's help; it is just necessary to keep NEXTSTEP out of the  
loop.

The procedure that I describe below will allow Executor to directly  
access SCSI hard drives, but currently you can only have Executor  
access them "read only".  That limitation is a bug, and sometime soon  
a new version of Executor (1.3a) will be on the archives with that  
bug fixed.

With removable media, such as floppies, and CD-ROMs, all you have to  
do is make sure you start Executor *before* you insert the media.   
Executor pushs NEXTSTEP's Mac filesystem support out of the way when  
it starts up, and restores it when it quits.  While Executor is  
running, it detects when Mac media has been inserted.

However, what Noam wants to do requires a little work.  What you need  
to do is push NEXTSTEP's Mac filesystem stuff aside by hand, *before*  
the Mac drive is mounted.  You can do that by logging in through  
"console", going into /usr/filesystems and renaming the directory  
"mac.fs" to anything you want, as long as it doesn't end in ".fs".   
"mac.fs.HOLD" will do it.  Then, when you log in, the filesystem in  
question will not be mounted.  You're half way there.

After you've renamed "mac.fs" and logged in, you'll need to fire up  
Executor and click the initial "OK" button.  Then, you'll need to  
manually tell Executor that there is a SCSI disk available.  To do so  
you'll need to use Terminal (or Stuart) and type the following  
command in:

	/usr/filesystems/HFS_XFer.fs/HFS_XFer.util -p sdN

where "N" is the logical drive number that NEXTSTEP assigns to your  
SCSI id.  NEXTSTEP assigns logical drive numbers starting at zero,  
and increasing by one for each SCSI target found.  NOTE:  This is  
different from the SCSI target number.  If you have a machine with  
only two SCSI targets:  target #1 and target #3, target #1 will be  
assigned *logical* drive number 0, and target #3 will be assigned  
*logical* drive number 1.

Most of this information is covered in the Executor/NEXTSTEP manual  
in the "Advanced Topics" chapter, under the heading "Accessing  
Macintosh Formatted Hard Drives and CD ROMs", beginning on page 55.   
However, the details of how to push NEXTSTEP's Mac filesystem aside  
were not available when the manual was printed.

	--Cliff