Re: HFS+ Resize problems

[Stewart Smith]

Okay, I've managed to track this down a bit further (with apologies for
bad reply positioning karma):

FWB's Partition Toolkit also failed to resize this volume, except
instead of failing nicely, it just sat there and ran out of memory - in
the way that halts the machine. Don't buy this product, it doesn't work.
At least this patch doesn't cost you $20USD for it not to work :)

When I (finally) got to speak to FWB person (not machine), they said
that Apple had made some modifications to the on disk format in some
recent release, and this is why they couldn't resize it. Sounds like a
poor excuse, but there you go. Apparently any drive formatted with
recent versions of OSX will do this.

On the up side, all the OSX utils (newfs, fsck etc) are open source
(under APSL) so that could help. There's also the efforts of the hfsplus
kernel driver (which is getting better and causing less corruption by
the bug-fix :)

Next time I boot into OSX i'll be sure to make a file system to fiddle
with (this will probably be next time i have the urge to watch a
non-jerky DVD :)

My solution to 'resizing' was to buy another HD, put it in a box over a
network, copy my data across, mkfs, copy data back. sloowww... but it
worked :)

On Sat, 2003-07-05 at 06:23, K.G. wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Many thanks for your report (it's the first one I receive ! :))
> The behaviour you describe is typical when "something" went wrong during
> various checks, for example if there is a file that the file system doesn't
> completly describe, but this kind of simple corruption should be detected by
> Disk First Aid and hpfsck I think, and that's not your case so it's quite 
> interresting.
> I'd not tested resizing HFS+ with OS X on it, and maybe I lack support
> for undocumented features of this filesystem, if there is any.
> What could be quite interresting is an image of a (maybe small) FS that
> parted with my patch fail to resize. I could work on it without any right
> on the raw hard drive device, it's better for your computers because
> debugging this kind of tool is a quite destructive process ! :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Guillaume
> 
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 15:12:30 +1000
> Stewart Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > grabbed the Gentoo live CD for ppc (pretty cool)
> > 
> > grabbed the parted-static with hfs+ support (presumably with the 8th
> > patch, although i did compile my own too just to be sure) and (after
> > the backup) tried the resize of the 40GB HFS+ partition with about
> > 30.5GB of data on it.
> > 
> > Didn't get far. Got a (very breif) display of "resizing" and then
> > back to the parted prompt. Partition undamaged mind you :)
> > 
> > I tried both with and without journaling enabled on the partition
> > (generally run it with journaling on under OSX).
> > 
> > Any thoughts?
> > 
> > The partition fsck's okay under OSX (in single user).
> > 
> > 
> > It's interesting to note that FWB Partition Toolkit also seems to crap
> > itself, although it does it by just bombing OS9 with a type 10 error.
> > I've mailed their tech support.... if i don't get a response soon I'm
> > going to start getting antzy at them (read cancelling the Visa payment) :)
> > 
> > 
> > I'd be happy to help with a OSX port/HFS+ testing. I've got an iMac 266
> > sitting around here that I could load X onto (currently running Debian,
> > when it's switched on) and link up to the net via SSH if that helps
> > (Andrew, saw your post a little while back asking for something like this)
> > 
> > It's only got a 6GB disk, but should be enough - used to have OSX on there,
> > not fastest thing in the world, but surprisingly usable.
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > Stewart Smith
> > Vice President, Linux Australia
> > http://www.linux.org.au (personal: http://www.flamingspork.com)
> > 
> > 
>