Need help mounting Next formatted Zip Disks on Mac

[Spockie]

Hi there,

I have a couple of Iomega Zip 100 disks I used under Nextstep 3.3 (on HP PA RISC). I converted those disks into Nextstep's file system back in the 1990s.

I have recently acquired a Zip drive with USB interface and connected it to my modern Mac (12.6 Monterey). FAT formatted disks work well. But my Mac can't read my Nextstep converted disks.

Since my HP PA RISC doesn't work anymore and I still want to access my old data on those disks: Is there a driver for Mac out there, that can read the Nextstep file system?

Thanks in advance!

[barcher174]

There used to be a nextstep plugin for fuse. I don't know how up to date it would be:

https://osxfuse.github.io/

[wa2flq]

If you have access to a Linux environment (VM or physical), here are the commands I use to mount NeXTStep volumes from Zip media.

First I would get the raw block by block image of the disk into a file on the Mac.  '#' should be the USB drive. Be careful using dd with root privileges, as it can destroy volumes if used incorrectly.

$ sudo dd if=/dev/disk#/s#  of=Disk_Next_NS3.1.img        

Then on the Linux environment mount it
$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0 Disk_Next_NS3.1.img
$ sudo mount -t ufs -r -o ufstype=openstep /dev/loop0 /media/NSdisk
$ ls /media/NSdisk
AAA  Folder spare Boot                        NextAdmin
Apps                                          NextApps
Atape                                          NextDeveloper
ATIRageDisplayDriver.4.041.m.README.txt        NextLibrary