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Ken Gagne's picture
Ken Gagne

Techbits

More posts | Read bio

August 31, 2009 - 8:08 A.M.

Losing legacy data to Snow Leopard

16 comments

When Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel CPUs, we lost the ability to run Classic/OS 9 software. Now, with Snow Leopard, we no longer have support for older PowerPC hardware.

There's one more handicap that hasn't been widely advertised: Snow Leopard won't write to HFS-formatted disks, either.

The Hierarchical File System was introduced in 1985 with System 2.1 and was the Mac standard for data storage until 1998, when Mac OS 8.1 switched to HFS+. Despite the new standard, Macs continued to offer full support of the older HFS format. But no more. Though Snow Leopard still offers read-only access to HFS volumes, you will no longer be able to create new disk images and partitions or write to existing ones, including to save or update files.

See Computerworld's

For some users, this impediment affects modern data as well. I'm a retrocomputing fan for whom HFS is the only file system that the Macintosh and the Apple IIGS natively have in common. I use an emulator to transfer files between the two environments, which requires writing to an HFS volume on the Mac. Now this is no longer an option. Maybe MacFUSE, an open source method for expanding Mac OS X's file system capabilities, can add HFS support, similarly to how it already has read-only access for ProDOS, the Apple II disk format.

Even modern computer users should be annoyed by this feature withdrawal. Upgrades should offer us more options, not fewer. We previously believed that Snow Leopard Server would support ZFS, which would soften the blow: we'd still lose access to legacy data, but at least the OS would offer an equivalent number of file systems. Since we didn't get ZFS, is there a reason to drop HFS support as well? Was the file system translator not 32-bit and thus not worth rewriting for 64?

If you haven't upgraded yet, you may want to copy any essential files from your HFS disks to an HFS+ volume, where Snow Leopard will let you read and write them, so that you can follow Apple in its transition away from supporting legacy formats.

CORRECTION This post originally stated that Snow Leopard had dropped all support for HFS. The blog has been updated to reflect that read-only access is still available.

What People Are Saying

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Found a workaround

Submitted by Bart the Scientist on October 15, 2009 - 12:46 P.M.

Well I've found a temporary workaround for this which is to install TransMac on my bootcamp XP installation which I then run under Parallels (which I do for other reasons most of the time anyway). TransMac is happy to mount and read and write to my old HFS disks. Kind of ironic that it takes windows software to write to Mac HFS disks but it works like a charm and I'm happily upgraded to Snow Leopard. So until someone comes up with some other third party Mac solution it'll do.

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There is no reason for OS X

Submitted by disagree on September 17, 2009 - 4:03 P.M.

There is no reason for OS X to still support HFS. It's a very, very, very good thing that Apple drops legacy software. Otherwise you end up with the spaghetti code of Windows.

That said, a third party option for read/write support of HFS would be nice. It would make mini vMac more useful.

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Don't bury it, open-source it.

Submitted by Mac-Guyver on September 12, 2009 - 11:57 A.M.

I think it's smart that Apple simplifies the software they're supporting. But whenever they drop something they should open-source it.

The Darwin HFS drivers from 10.5 are probably already open source, it's probably a matter of someone figuring out how to re-install them in 10.6.

Apple should open-source OS 9.2.2, the old Mac ROMs, Classic, and the 68000 emulator.

I remember Steve Wozniak complaining in 1984 about companies that bury products they don't want. Copyright and patent law were created to encourage releasing, not hiding information. Top line of the woz.org website: "Welcome to free exchange of information, the way it always should be."

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This is a big problem for us

Submitted by Bart the Scientist on September 9, 2009 - 6:22 P.M.

I run a research laboratory that collects data using old programs written for old hardware that only runs in the nubus slots of old macs which only understand HFS. Until now this was not a problem as we could write data and experimental control files back and forth to the new computers. Basically many years of development and time went into the old programs and hardware and although it has all been rewritten for new hardware at this point there are still quite a few experiments for which believe it or not the old hardware is actually much faster and far superior. So this will be a major impediment to us adapting Snow Leopard which I really love otherwise. So if anyone can come up with a solution it would be very useful to us.

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Your opening statement

Submitted by Anonymous on August 31, 2009 - 6:14 P.M.

"When Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel CPUs, we lost the ability to run Classic/OS 9 software."

What software are you referring to, most OS9 software should work on intel macs using rosette? It was a default install through leopard, snow leaopard did make it optional but it is still available.

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Rosetta

Submitted by Ken Gagne on August 31, 2009 - 7:53 P.M.

Rosetta allows an Intel Mac to run software that was written for the PowerPC version of Mac OS X. It will not run Classic software. Trying to run a program that was written for OS 9 will not work on an Intel Mac, even in Leopard; you'll instead get an error message:

See Tony's comment for more details.

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OS9 software.

Submitted by CarlK on August 31, 2009 - 7:23 P.M.

Rosetta runs PPC software on Intel, it does not run OS9 software. We had the option of running OS9 through Tiger by running Classic (OS9) in a window. That went away in Leopard.

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HFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard

Submitted by James on August 31, 2009 - 1:14 P.M.

Read only access to the HFS file system is not new in Snow Leopard, as this was also the case in Leopard (10.5).

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OS 9 / Rosetta / 10.5 Read Only HFS?

Submitted by Tony Diaz on August 31, 2009 - 7:24 P.M.

Complete support for HFS was provided all the way through 10.5. I used it nearly every day. Thats what the remaining PowerPC portable will do now, and the .. 'tablet' Mac ;-)

As for OS 9 apps and Rosetta, you're a bit mistaken about whats what and whats not.

OS 9 refers to those applications that ran on Macintosh OS, "MacOS" 6, 7, 8 .. 9 before the release of OS X. The operating system with the multi colored Apple in the upper left, the Chooser for the printers, and AppleShare volumes. Support for that was dropped with the introduction of the Intel Macintosh models and for all Macintosh models that were supported by 10.5 and up. That is, Any PowerMac G4 or below running any version of Mac OS X could run "Classic" to run these older applications. But if you got an Intel Mac or any Mac with Leopard/10.5 you could no longer use the Classic environment option.

Rosetta is PowerPC emulation for those applications written to operate under Mac OS X 10.0 and beyond that themselves have not been recompiled or otherwise made available in an Intel binary release. Now there were some applications that ran both under Classic MacOS and Mac OS X using the same executable that detected what the environment was and handled things accordingly. But not all "Classic" applications did this.

Back to HFS support- as a side experiment I did some changes to the component within the Mac OS X 10.6 release that specifically handled the HFS and HFS Plus file systems and was able to return HFS write support as far as Disk Utility was concerned but the OS core itself balked and that confirmed that changes were not just superficial but rather from within the core as well. The superficial changes negated any need for any official dialogs from within by simply not offering any support to create volumes.

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Read/Write in Leopard

Submitted by Ken Gagne on August 31, 2009 - 1:24 P.M.

Leopard (10.5) can read AND write HFS disks; I do so every day. Reducing it to read-only is new to Snow Leopard (10.6).

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