[X4U] Disk Utility on Panther and Tiger

[David Ledger]

>From: Wayne Clodfelter <wayne at troutnc.com>
>
>I have a Panther boot volume and a Tiger boot volume.
>I started up in Panther and was going to open Disk Utility to verify
>the Tiger disk.
>Oops! What if DU on Panther is not compatible with Tiger?
>It probably isn't--though I have not seen a statement to that effect
>anywhere.
>
>Two thoughts here.
>ONE, Disk Utility under a superseded version of OS X should not even
>be able to verify/repair a system disk of a later release unless it
>is compatible. Does anyone know if it attempts the verify/repair of
>if it balks when such a run is attempted?
>
>TWO, it should be possible for the latest version of Disk Utility to
>be installed/copied over to boot volumes containing earlier OS X
>releases.
>Has anyone done this and achieved a working application? How did you
>achieve the install/copy?
>Of course, this raises the question whether the latest release of
>Disk Utility is always backwards compatible with earlier OS X
>incarnations. Is this true or not?

ONE.  Filesystem repair utilities look at filesystems; that is they 
see a partition as an array of bytes that must conform to some rules. 
They do not look at files. Examining files needs a whole section of 
the OS to support it, and that may not be available. When disc 
utilities start looking at the contents of a disc and then deciding 
that the data indicates that it shouldn't repair it, we've lost 
something - even if it would protect you from Norton. If the 
filesystem it's pointed at is incompatible it will notice; if it's 
just created by newer software it may not notice, or be written to 
ignore the fact.

TWO.  From what others have said here you can use later versions of 
Disk Utility  to repair discs created by older systems, but I don't 
know how far back that goes. 10.3 Disk Utility worked with my OS9 
partition on my G4. That partition was loaded while booted from the 
OS9 install CD. Havn't repaired that partition since I put Tiger on 
it last weekend (at last - using FireWire disk mode from my PB). If a 
newer utility runs on an older OS it means that the library calls 
have all resolved and so it should be fine.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
Chair of HPUX SysAdmin SIG of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk