[GTALUG] Anyone on the list know what I need to read ancient Apple disks?
Stewart C. Russell
scruss at gmail.com
Sat Jan 3 21:37:52 UTC 2015
On 2015-01-03 03:55 PM, David Collier-Brown wrote:
>
> what modern machines can read Mac file formats?
Last time I tried this (~2007), a Mac HD was recognized immediately on
attaching it to a Linux box. PPC Macs used their own slightly weird
partitioning system, but all the HFS filesystems mounted read-only
correctly. hfsutils provides a crude shell environment if you ever need
to delve into HFS images.
Your biggest problem will be the file formats. MacOS 9 was still heavily
into its data+resource fork model, so you can often be left with little
clue what type of file is on the disk, or be stuck with crazy encoding
issues. Mac Applications used to be a mess of very proprietary file
formats (Apple Works, I am glaring at you), so let's hope any data you
can get off the disk is in something vaguely sensible. And yes, formats
like Word and Excel would be considered sensible ones here …
Old Macs use just CR for newlines, FYI.
cheers,
Stewart
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