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Making an executor partition



All the talk about executor partitions gave me an idea.
The following works under linux (and probably NextStep) to get
an mac formatted partition.  Be careful.  If you don't understand
what is follows, you probably shouldn't try it, since you may
inadvertantly clobber your existing data.  I did this
on my swap partition (/dev/hda3) just to see if it would work.


First, choose a partition and determine its size:

% dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/null bs=1024
32760+0 records in
32760+0 records out

Next create an hfv file of this size using makehfv:

% makehfv bob.hfv ExecutorPartition 32760K
% du -s bob.hfv
526     bob.hfv

As you can see, the file bob.hfv doesn't really consume much
space, even though it is a 32M file (perhaps because it
contains mostly zeros).

Now copy the file to the partition:

% dd if=bob.hfv of=/dev/hda3
32760+0 records in
32760+0 records out

or simply:

% cp bob.hfv /dev/hda3

Finally, make a symbolic link from the partition to a file
ending in .hfv:

% cd ~/MacVols
% ln -s /dev/hda3 hda3.hfv

Now executor will happily use the partition as a drive:

% setenv MacVolumes ~/MacVols
% executor

FWIW, the much simpler approaches:

% makehfv /dev/hda3 ExecutorPartition 33760K

and

% ln -s /dev/hda3 hda3.hfv
% makehfv hda3.hfv ExecutorPartition 33760K

don't work, due to precautions taken by the makehfv program.

--Bill Magro