Accessing Real Partitions

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J. Gryphon
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Accessing Real Partitions

Post by J. Gryphon »

I could ask this about Qemu or SheepShaver separately, but figured I'd hit on the whole range here.

Since Qemu can be set up to access a physical CD, could it hypothetically be configured to read/write to a genuine HFS/HFS+ partition? Whether it can or can't, do any of the other emulators have that functionality?
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adespoton
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Re: Accessing Real Partitions

Post by adespoton »

QEMU definitely can, as I've done it. However, I've had an issue with the raw interface in recent versions of QEMU and have had to use the text interface instead, which is slower.

Theoretically SheepShaver could also do it, but at least on OS X the feature hasn't been compiled in. I know that at least one version of BII for Windows supports it though.
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Cat_7
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Re: Accessing Real Partitions

Post by Cat_7 »

Qemu can.

I don't know what host(s) you have available, but on MacOS and Linux hosts I could access a USB drive, format it from within Mac OS 9.2 with hfs+ , copy a system folder to it and even boot from it.

-On MacOS host, a simple unmount of the USB drive and subsequent addition to the Qemu command line worked perfectly: -hdb /dev/disk5

-On linux host, adding -hdb /dev/sdf9 worked perfectly.
(of course, /dev/disk5 and /dev/sdf9 are only true in my situation.)

Note that in the above cases Qemu has to be run as root to be able to access real drives.

-On Windows host, one can partition a usb drive from e.g. 10.3, while 9.x fail to partition the disk.
The drive can be accessed by adding -hdb G: (in my case).
That drive can be used (albeit somewhat unreliable) to copy files to and from in OSX guest. 9.x choke on copying.

Best,
Cat_7
Last edited by Cat_7 on Tue Sep 25, 2018 6:39 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: added Linux/Windows info
uyjulian
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Re: Accessing Real Partitions

Post by uyjulian »

Do not run QEMU as root!!!!
Instead, change permissions for the drive(s) you want to access:

sudo chmod a+rw /dev/disk5
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