Create a case-sensitive HFS boot disk
Feb 08, '05 10:50:00AM
Contributed by: gospodin_david
Well, this one isn't easy, but it's doable, as long as you have a second hard drive (or computer in FireWire target disk mode) to boot off of. Just be sure that you have backups first. I was reading the Apple Discussions and came across this thread, which discusses making your boot volume an HFSX (case-sensitive HFS+) volume.
Read the rest of the hint for the process...
[robg adds: An earlier hint referenced a simpler solution for creating an HFSX drive -- but it won't work for your boot disk. This process does. As noted above, and below in the steps, and here, you will have to format and erase your drive to get this done. Do not proceed unless you're confident in your ability to restore from your backups! I have not tested this one...]
The procedure is as follows:
- Install Mac OS X on a separate hard drive (or if you already have an installation on another Mac, that'll work too).
- Open up a Terminal on the separate installation and type this:
sudo pico /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Info.plist
Type your password when it asks (although I personally used vi).
- Go down in the file until you find the key called FSServerOnly and change the true on the following line to false.
- Exit pico, saving as you do so (Control-X).
- Make very certain you've backed up everything on the original drive -- you're about to blow it away.
- Mount your original disk on the new installation of OS X. I did this by installing a new copy of OS X on a FireWire drive and booting off of it, thus my original drive was mounted when I booted up. If you're doing this from another Mac, you can boot your original Mac in FireWire mode and just plug it in; it'll mount on your desktop.
- Open Disk Utility in the Applications:Utilities folder of your new installation of OS X and "Erase" your original disk using the newly enabled Case-Sensitive/Journaled option. This is why you have a backup. Note that using newfs_hfs -s will not work for this step; if you do so, you will have an unbootable system when you're done.
- Reinstall OS X on the original system, update, and restore your backup. Make sure that you don't re-erase the drive during the installation process.
That's it; enjoy the niftiness of HFSX on your Mac, and bask in the splendor of having "Untitled.txt" and "UNtitled.txt" in the same directory.
Note that although I've been running this way for a week or so, there could be problems I haven't yet encountered. Nonetheless, SilverKeeper still works for backups, even on files which only differ by case, and I can't think of an application which is more important than a backup utility, especially in terms of having it work with your filesystem.
Additionally, if you, like me, use a hard drive for backups (thus the use of SilverKeeper), you'll want to reformat it as HFSX as well, assuming that you wish to backup all the files on your new drive. To do so (or, for that matter, to be able to format arbitrary disks with HFSX), edit the above-mentioned .plist file in the above-mentioned fashion on your system.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200502011939237