[X-HW] CD Burning for older Macs

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Friday, Nov 28, 2003, at 15:29 Canada/Eastern, Doug McNutt wrote:

> Can you expound a bit more on that?

This is hardly the place, and I'm hardly the one to do it. I think it 
suffices for us to know that, if you're not running Mac OS 8.1 or 
newer, you can't access HFS+ volumes -- period.

> The biggest difference between HFS and HFS+ is the size of the 
> allocation blocks and possibly wasted space on large drives.

I'm afraid you're wrong; while HFS and HFS+ are very similar, there are 
other significant distinctions. For more details, see Apple Tech Note 
TN1150.

> Why would OS neXt not use ordinary HFS?

The following is from the Darwin documentation:

>> File Systems Overview
>>
>> Mac OS X provides “out-of-the-box” support for several different file 
>> systems. These include Mac OS Extended format (HFS+), the BSD 
>> standard file system format (UFS), NFS (an industry standard for 
>> networked file systems), ISO 9660 (used for CD-ROM), MS-DOS, SMB 
>> (Windows file sharing standard), AFP (Mac OS file sharing), and UDF.
>>
>> Support is also included for reading the older, Mac OS Standard 
>> format (HFS) file-system type; however, you should not plan to format 
>> new volumes using Mac OS Standard format. Mac OS X cannot boot from 
>> these file systems, nor does the Mac OS Standard format provide some 
>> of the information required by Mac OS X.
>>
>> The Mac OS Extended format provides many of the same characteristics 
>> as Mac OS Standard format but adds additional support for modern 
>> features such as file permissions, longer filenames, Unicode, both 
>> hard and symbolic links, and larger disk sizes. [...]

Note that you can still use HFS in OS X. I don't know whether you can 
or not write HFS CDs directly in Jaguar or Panther, but you can 
certainly do so with Toast if you need to. However, because of file 
names issues, you'll quickly discover it's much more convenient to use 
HFS+.

f