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[joevt]

that is interesting, because i do not have it in 10.5.x on a quicksilver, only in 10.4.x

Did you have an external FireWire drive selected in both cases?

[indibil]

The setting exists in Mac OS X 10.5.8 on Quad G5 or Intel Mac for hard drives in external FireWire enclosure or disk image.

that is interesting, because i do not have it in 10.5.x on a quicksilver, only in 10.4.x

It only appears if you select Apple partition map in the OPTIONS button. If it is in GUID or MBR it does not appear

[V.Yakob]

I recently learned about the Anubis utility, which allows you to create many partitions even on the oldest OS.

[Knezzen]

Nice find!

[aBc]

Interesting find.

Does this work well with external Firewire drives too.
And do all partitions appear and mount with OS 9?
(Especially with an external FW drive?)

I’ve no time to test, but here’s another (later) version available:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/anubis-plus-v352

Anyone care to test & report results from any external & FW drive.

[ssp3]

I recently learned about the Anubis utility, which allows you to create many partitions even on the oldest OS.

IIRC, the problem with 3rd party formatters was that they all installed their own drivers, which not always were up to date in regard to latest technologies or OSes.
I only used Apple or FWB, the latter being preferred, since they always were at the forefront.

EDIT. According to their v4 manual, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit can create up to 20 partitions! Not sure if that applies to FW devices, though.

[joevt]

My fork of DingusPPC can append any number of disks as additional partitions (this is different than Sheep Shaver's method of adding disks). I think Infinite Mac has the feature for its DingusPPC based machines but it might not be on the website yet. If you can get it to boot, then you can see how many partitions each OS version will mount. For system 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1, the number is like 16 or 18. I think it can boot 9.1 and 10.0 and 10.1 and 10.2 (using DPPC Beige G3). The virtual hard disk that is created includes the Mac OS 9 driver partitions that you get from 10.5.8 Disk Utility (8 partitions).

I don't know why the limit is 16 or 18. vRefNum is a 16 bit number. Drive numbers have positive values. volume reference numbers are negative values. The default volume is 0. "Inside Macintosh: Files" says volume reference numbers are small negative integers. What are large negative numbers? I think they are working directory reference numbers but I don't know the ranges of either set.

Possibly Mac OS X doesn't have this mount limit since it doesn't deal with volume reference numbers and working directory reference numbers? I haven't tested it yet.

[Mat]

As always I swear by Intech HD SpeedTools!
https://www.speedtools2.com/HDInfo.html

It claims to partition every FireWire drive up to 9 partitions (in FAT32) usable wth Macs and PCs. I could not find any information about internal HFS+ volumes so I guess it is just about the limit of the Apple Partition Map, which means 62 data partitions. Or perhaps the above discussed number of 21 "auto mount" partitions.

[joevt]

The standard Apple Partition Map is 64 blocks (including block0). Partition 1 in block 1 specifies the partition map size (63 blocks starting from block 1). Each partition specifies the number of used partitions. Therefore, there's no reason a partition map cannot contain hundreds of partitions. DingusPPC will let you append as many partitions as you like but 2 TB is the max size of the disk before I would need to add code to double the block size from 512 (to 1024 for 4 TB, 2048 for 8 TB, etc.) which might not be honoured by some Apple Partition Map interpreters?

[Jubadub]

DingusPPC will let you append as many partitions as you like but 2 TB is the max size of the disk before I would need to add code to double the block size from 512 (to 1024 for 4 TB, 2048 for 8 TB, etc.) which might not be honoured by some Apple Partition Map interpreters?

Such as the interpreter built into Mac OS 9.2.2, from my experience. Later interpreters such as the one in OS X Tiger and Leopard don't have this issue.

I know the drive size itself is not the issue for Mac OS 9.2.2, as I was able to use a 4TB drive that was formatted with Apple Partition Map configuring it as if it was a whole drive of 2 TB maximum capacity. This allows it to work fine with Mac OS 9.2.2, completely normally, on real hardware (MDD is what I did this with).

Curiously, the OS itself has no issue with, say, 4 TB volumes, at least if it's a network volume, like an AFP volume. The Finder will display the available disk space as some 4 thousand GBs on a window correctly, and do all the I/O just fine.

Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling? I'm not sure if that would be in the Mac OS ROM file, or the System file. Any ideas, @joevt?

[DieHard]

IIRC, the problem with 3rd party formaters was that they all installed their own drivers, which not always were up to date in regard to latest technologies or OSes.

Yes, this is spot on... the big "danger" in using 3rd party drivers (and dynamic drive overlays) is that you can end up in a situation where you desperately need data off a drive and you have to hook it to another mac (without the utilities installed) and... BAM... no mountable volume... which can really suck.  FWB was notorious for this, and even various versions of FWB were glitchy with each other.

So basically, the general rule of thumb is...

1) If you are always going to boot from the same volume with 3rd party drivers and 3rd party software installed... everything will be peachy keen (unless you corrupt your boot volume). If you do, you better remember exactly what version of 3rd party stuff you had installed, so you can make another boot drive with the exact software and then you can read your stuff as a non-boot volume.

2) Play it safe and use the Mac OS drive setup only

I use the latter for maximum inter connectivity

[joevt]

Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling? I'm not sure if that would be in the Mac OS ROM file, or the System file. Any ideas, @joevt?

You mean APM block size ceiling?

I don't know where in classic macOS all the Apple Partition Map parsers are located.

The supermario source code might have some clues.

SCSIBoot.a of the old SCSI Manager uses sbBlkSize for reading drivers listed in the Driver Descriptor Map. But it uses block size 512 to read entries from the partition map?

BootItt.c of SCSI Manager 4.3 is simular.

I don't see code in supermario that creates drives/volumes from the partition map entries. Maybe it's in the drivers listed in the Driver Descriptor Map. This and the above is covered in the first paragraph in the "Loading and Initializing a Driver" section of "Chapter 4: SCSI Manager 4.3" of "Inside Macintosh: Devices".

[robespierre]

Even in the 1980s, there were SCSI devices with sector sizes above 512 bytes: the magneto-optical disks. For example, the 650 MB type used 1024 bytes/sector, and the 9.1 GB type used 4096 bytes/sector. Since clearly these devices were supported, even in System 6.x, there is no reason that you couldn't achieve larger block sizes on a hard disk or SSD.

Incidentally, APS Power Tools can create 99 APM partitions.

[smilesdavis]

"ISO standard magneto-optical disks were first put on the market in 1988 for data recording with a capacity
of 650MB per two-sided 5.25-inch disk. In 1991 the ISO standard singlesided 3.5-inch MO disk with a capacity of 128MB was commercialized also for data recording. The recordable MiniDisc (MD) as well as the premastered MD were put on the digital audio recording market in 1992. The AlGalnP laser with a 680 nm wavelength has been used since
1995 for the advanced double-sided 5.25-inch MO disk with a 2.6 GB capacity and single-sided 3.5-inch MO disk with a 640MB capacity."

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-04143-7_9

1992: DigiDesign ProStore Optical

someday, fingers crossed, i will have such a prostore

[DieHard]

I Just sold a Magneto Optical on fleabay for $130 last week

Fujitsu Magneto Optical Drive MCR3230SS SCSI 2.3 GB, Rare, Awesome Cosmetic Cond

maybe it was too cheap, lol

https://www.ebay.com/itm/135209503638

[robespierre]

That sounds about right. The 2.3 GB GigaMO media is too hard to find IMHO. That drive will use all the prior 3.5" MO media though.

[IIO]

It only appears if you select Apple partition map in the OPTIONS button. If it is in GUID or MBR it does not appear

why would i select something different for OS9

Did you have an external FireWire drive selected in both cases?

yes of course, it is mostly firewire.

luckily i have two more reasons to have 10.4 and not 10.5 on these machines, otherwise it would be a pity because of formatting disks.

[ssp3]

The 2.3 GB GigaMO media is too hard to find IMHO.

Akai DD1000, Akai DD1500, Genex GX-8000 and Genex GX-8500 used them for recording audio, that's why.

[IIO]

Do we know where we could patch Mac OS to increase this AFP block size ceiling?

to me it always was a mystery why no application (including the OSX shell) allows you to use values bigger than that set maximum for the block size, and since it is not APM or HFS, it must be the operating systems.

couldnt you try to locate where that happens by debugging what fomatting programs do?

i am longingly awaiting a solution to use huge modern HDs without any restrictions. (that bigger blocks might increase the search time or something like that can probably not be avoided. for archival application this is unproblematic anyway)