hfx trashing hard disk partitions

[John Gilmore]

chuq at Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) wrote:
> Try 'hfx'ing to a floppy. Hfx won't let you copy to the MacOS partition on
> the A/UX disk (the Sash partition) because it sometimes caused really
> obscure data corruption. That's actually in the documentation somewhere, but
> it's not intuitive. 

This was true of the original Star-Nine utility that Apple bought and
included as "hfx" in A/UX 1.1.  (Star-Nine was another small company
selling A/UX software.)  We ordered a copy of this utility but, after
reading this rather incredible statement in the manual, sent it back.
Apparently Apple wasn't so picky.

Either hfx understands HFS file system format or it doesn't.  If it
doesn't understand file systems on hard disks, why does it work on floppies?
My suspicion is that it will trash your floppies under some conditions
too, but a trashed floppy is 'more acceptable' than a trashed hard disk.

Somehow I believed that if Apple would put it into the official A/UX
release, they would have fixed this bug.  SOMEBODY at Apple certainly
understands the MacOS file system!  But from Chuq's message, it seems
like they didn't bother.
-- 
John Gilmore    {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu    gnu at toad.com
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