PC-Mac SCSI data exchange question

[Ray Arachelian]

Arno Kletzander wrote:
> My second question concerns data transfer between (Windoze) PCs and Macs. I got a Power Macintosh 7200 (with Mac OS 8.0) which I would like to move some data to (approx. 3 GB); filesharing over Ethernet doesn't work without additional software since the Mac doesn't understand SMB/CIFS and W98/2k (not Server)don't understand enough AFS. "Web Sharing" only supports the opposite direction (PC can read data from the Mac) unless I'm missing something.
>
> So what I'm left with is pushing the stuff onto an idle 4GB SCSI disk that I can then hang off the Mac. Unfortunately I couldn't get an idea how to accomplish this: if I format the disk on the PC, the Mac will come up with "Uninitialized Volume". Initializing the volume as "DOS 4GB" doesn't work, the same dialog comes up again after I restart and going back to the PC I can even still read the contents! I tried one FAT32 partition (primary) as well as two FAT16 drives inside an extended partition.
>
>   
There are many ways to go, some twisty, some straightforward:

1 There was a commercial Samba client named "Dave" for Mac OS.  If you 
can find that, it will do the trick.  Indeed, w2k server will share out 
AFS, but since you don't have that,  you'll need another path.

2. If you're familiar with Unix, you might try a flavor of Linux on a 
machine that has a SCSI bus to which you could mount the drive.   For 
example, if your w2k machine has a SCSI controller, you could mount the 
7200's hard drive in it (or in an external enclosure), boot off a Live 
Linux CD, mount the w2k's hard drive with ntfs-3g, mount the OS 8 hard 
drive with hfsplus, and copy the data at will.  If this is unavailable 
to you, you could also go with a commercial product such as: 
http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/  -- there are physical 
dangers here if you're not careful with the drive (static, dropping 
drive on the floor, miswiring it, damage from a broken external case, 
etc.) as well as soft dangers here (you might accidentally damage the OS 
8 hard drive by writing to it, so be sure you know which drive is which 
and mount everything read only until you're 100% sure, etc.)

4. Other choices, get a machine that runs OS X, perhaps a good old G4 
with large hard drives, which will allow you to share both AFS and CIFS. 

5. Find an old copy of Netware 4.x and build yourself a Netware file 
server, these too work as a nice file server.  (sigh, brings back old 
memories of my misspent youth :-)

6. Install NetATalk on a Linux machine and use it as a server (I've not 
played with this myself, so I've no idea what it does to resource forks)

7. Turn on an ftp daemon on one of the machines - you could install 
Cygwin on the w2k machine and run one of the ftpd's on there, or you can 
find a windows ftp server (i.e. http://www.warftp.org/ )  that will work 
on w2k workstation - if I remember right, there's a half crippled 
version of IIS on there which acts as a personal web server - perhaps 
like it's bigger brother it may have an ftpd.  Or if that's not 
available, use a third machine that does have an ftpd (Linux, FreeBSD, 
OpenVMS, etc.) as a go-between.  There are ftp clients for the Mac, and 
it wouldn't surprise me if you could find an ftpd for OS 8 either ( 
http://www.pure-mac.com/ftp.html )

8.  You could use an scp/ssh client such as NiftyTelnet 
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jonasw/freeware/niftyssh/ - which might work 
on OS 8 (I think it may want OS 9 though) to copy the data over scp to a 
server that has an sshd (there is one for windows - 
http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/  )

9. For 3GB of data, the worst thing you could do is go over a serial 
port with a terminal program such as ZTerm on one end and HyperTerminal 
on the windows end.  It's horrible because at most you'll be able to go 
at 56Kbps and will take forever.

10. You could go with one of the sneakernet paths: some sort of 
removable drive such as ZIP, Jazz, CD-R, etc. but you'll need to somehow 
break up the data into pieces and use a common file system (ISO9660 and 
its variants for the CD's, FAT16 for the windoze friendly ones, etc.)

A Bit of warning:

All of these paths to transferring data may suffer from the issues with 
the metadata and the resource forks, so the safest thing to do is to 
archive resource/metadata sensitive files (Applications, INIT's, etc) 
with a Mac specific archiver such as StuffIt.  (There is an unstuff 
command for Unix available in plain C source code, there is also a 
closed source Windows version of StuffIt, so if you need to, you can get 
the data off out of them.)

Some of the above paths have built in support for resource forks.  w2k's 
server sharing. Netware's AFS sharing, an OS X machine, and possible 
others will allow resource forks and metadata to be stored and safely 
accessed again from a Mac, and allow the data forks to be accessed from 
PC's.  Others, will not and you risk losing the data.  So you really 
need to ask if that 3GB's worth of data depends on the resource forks or 
not.