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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