Hawaiʻi's Technology Community
Converting to case-sensitive filesystem non-destructively?
The hard drive on my Macbook recently died in horrible fashion (loud clicking noise -- no computer I've hooked it up to will even acknowledge that it's there), so I bought a new one and went through the process of reinstalling Tiger and then Leopard and all kinds of software, etc.
When I bought the computer, the filesystem was formatted as case-sensitive. Somehow this time around, I accidentally formatted as case-insensitive, which I do not want. I make reasonably heavy use of the Unix side of OS X and like it to behave as such.
Is there a way to change the formatting without reformatting? My model of how things work leads me to believe that this CAN be done, although perhaps utilities to do so don't exist. It seems that files are, in fact, being stored in the filesystem with the exact capitalization that I specify, but that comparisons are just looser. For example anytime the filesystem needs to compare, it just uses something like upperCase(file1) == upperCase(file2) and it seems to me that deciding to use the upperCase() comparison vs no transformation would just be triggered by some case-sensitive flag in the filesystem. So, toggling the flag in the filesystem would be all you'd need to do and everything would just behave normally. Anything I'm missing here? Obviously converting from case-sensitive to case-insensitive would be harder because you'll have collisions that need to be resolved, but I feel like I should be able to do what I want to do.
Thoughts?
When I bought the computer, the filesystem was formatted as case-sensitive. Somehow this time around, I accidentally formatted as case-insensitive, which I do not want. I make reasonably heavy use of the Unix side of OS X and like it to behave as such.
Is there a way to change the formatting without reformatting? My model of how things work leads me to believe that this CAN be done, although perhaps utilities to do so don't exist. It seems that files are, in fact, being stored in the filesystem with the exact capitalization that I specify, but that comparisons are just looser. For example anytime the filesystem needs to compare, it just uses something like upperCase(file1) == upperCase(file2) and it seems to me that deciding to use the upperCase() comparison vs no transformation would just be triggered by some case-sensitive flag in the filesystem. So, toggling the flag in the filesystem would be all you'd need to do and everything would just behave normally. Anything I'm missing here? Obviously converting from case-sensitive to case-insensitive would be harder because you'll have collisions that need to be resolved, but I feel like I should be able to do what I want to do.
Thoughts?
Views: 962
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Matthew Price on
-
I believe you can do this using the disk utility on the Leopard DVD. I know you can turn Journaling on and off.
Matt -
-
Permalink Reply by Nate Sanders on
-
Yeah, I had talked to people who told me you could turn journaling on/off and at least one of those same people told me that you could _not_ change case sensitivity. I used the Leopard DVD and found the menu option (it's an explicit command in the menu that you enable by using the "option" key -- unfortunately not part of a larger set of features that would allow you to change data about a volume) for journaling, but there's nothing similar for case-sensitivity.
I did a command-I on the volume and while it lists many data items, it doesn't have a "case-sensitive" flag. It makes sense that it wouldn't, as that's probably just a piece of the partition type or something.
I did find this:
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php ($44.95) and it claims to be able to convert between case-sensitive/case-insensitive
-- Nate -
-
-
You could always just make a time machine backup and then re-install Leopard. Should not take too long. I have done this kind of restore a few times and it has worked without issue.
Matt -
-
-
I'll take a look at Time Machine -- I've never used it and don't know its feature list.
Thanks,
Nate
Matthew Price said:You could always just make a time machine backup and then re-install Leopard. Should not take too long. I have done this kind of restore a few times and it has worked without issue.
Matt -
© 2024 Created by Daniel Leuck.
Powered by
