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GenEx 1.0b1 is copyright 1994 by Jay Krell. All rights reserved. GenEx is freeware. You may distribute it freely, but you may not sell it for more than duplication costs. Even though no fee is mandated, it's still be nice to get some feedback; read/skip through to the end for addresses. ...I've been sharing hard drives between my IIGS and various Macintoshes since soon after System 6 was released and the capability shouldn't be difficult to take advantage of. GenEx is a simple, bare-bones application with a small purpose, to extract a GenericMacSCSI driver from the version of Advanced Disk Utility included in Apple IIGS System Software 6.0 and 6.0.1 (and future?). What is GenericMacSCSI? On the Macintosh, each device (or at least many) must have a driver on it, instead of installing a driver in the System folder as is done on the IIGS. If you format a hard drive with IIGS Advanced Disk Utility (ADU), it makes room for a Macintosh driver and tries in two ways to fill the space. (I suspect it only reserves the space if you make an HFS partition, but I can't check now.) If it identifies the device as an Apple brand hard drive, it uses a driver built into it; if it is not an Apple brand hard drive, it looks for a file called GenericMacSCSI in the Drivers folder of the booted System and uses it. The nasty hack that GenEx pulls is to read the Apple brand driver out of ADU (its "location" is documented) and writes it to a file named GenericMacSCSI. [Success with ADU format]...I have personally used the Apple driver on a Quantum ProDrive 40 and 100 and 44 Meg Syquest on a Macintosh LC, II... [Comparisons to problems formatting with a Mac]...I formatted a hard drive on a Mac once and the IIGS saw like 32 LARGE BAD DEVICES on it; it appeared to me that instead of filling unused partition information with zeros, the formatter filled it with some other number. ADU would not even format the hard drive. I had to use the 8-bit utilities to format it and then ADU. Another good option for formatting hard drives for use on both Macs and Apple II's is Apple's HD SC Setup on a Mac. However, to use it with non-Apple drives, you either need the version included with A/UX (Apple's flavor of Unix) or you need to apply a patch recently published in MacWeek. Normally, HD SC Setup only formats Apple brand hard drives. [More features possible]...possible features added: If I understand the System 6 documentation correctly, a Macintosh driver can be added to an already formatted hard drive. This is likely to be very useful for anyone with a hard drive with data on it that they'd like to connect to a Macintosh. Let me know if you need this and I'll consider adding it (I'm presently tired and feeling lazy, but that changes). ...The name GenEx stands for GenericMacSCSI Extractor and, in a slight nod to pop press, Generation X, of which I guess I am a junior member. Jay Krell 734 North Highlands Drive Harrisburg PA 17111