Hi there,
I wanted to alert everyone about an unpreserved piece of Mac history that Pierre Dandumont first told me about.
The gist of it is that according to Apple, the Performa 550 had a hidden recovery partition that it would boot from if the main system folder was screwed up. This hidden partition would be lost if you ever reformatted the drive. Here are a couple of old Apple tech notes that talk about it:
If you temporarily change the type of the partition to Apple_HFS instead of Apple_Recovery, it'll show up on the desktop with the name Recovery Volume. After changing it back to Apple_Recovery, it hides itself. The computer will even automatically boot from the hidden partition if you put a minimal system folder on it and screw up your main system folder, like I did below.
I haven't found any way to use any of the Performa software to automatically put anything onto this partition. I suspect that at least at one point, Apple was shipping the machines from the factory with the recovery partition fully populated and ready to go, with some software on it responsible for showing the message about it having trouble booting.
My purpose in making this post is to ensure the community is aware of this little piece of lost history so we can all keep our eyes out for it. If you come across a Performa 550 with its original Quantum 160 MB hard drive, please dump the drive using something like a BlueSCSI in Initiator Mode and check to see if the recovery partition is there! I would be super interested in getting a copy of the content of the partition, and it would be good for software preservation purposes for it to be saved for everyone.
Even if the drive has succumbed to the infamous gooey rubber bumpers and won't stay spun up anymore, there is an easy (but slightly terrifying) way to temporarily get it to stay spinning so you can dump it. If anyone needs any assistance with dumping the drive contents or going over the results to see if the recovery partition is still intact, please let me know!
Thank you!
I wanted to alert everyone about an unpreserved piece of Mac history that Pierre Dandumont first told me about.
The gist of it is that according to Apple, the Performa 550 had a hidden recovery partition that it would boot from if the main system folder was screwed up. This hidden partition would be lost if you ever reformatted the drive. Here are a couple of old Apple tech notes that talk about it:
- Performa 550: Description of Backup Partition (3/94)
- Performa 550: System Folder Created w/ Dinosaur Safari CD (8/94)
- This second article provides more detail about how the recovery partition worked, with a dialog that popped up talking about the computer having trouble starting up and having Shutdown and Continue options.
If you temporarily change the type of the partition to Apple_HFS instead of Apple_Recovery, it'll show up on the desktop with the name Recovery Volume. After changing it back to Apple_Recovery, it hides itself. The computer will even automatically boot from the hidden partition if you put a minimal system folder on it and screw up your main system folder, like I did below.
I haven't found any way to use any of the Performa software to automatically put anything onto this partition. I suspect that at least at one point, Apple was shipping the machines from the factory with the recovery partition fully populated and ready to go, with some software on it responsible for showing the message about it having trouble booting.
My purpose in making this post is to ensure the community is aware of this little piece of lost history so we can all keep our eyes out for it. If you come across a Performa 550 with its original Quantum 160 MB hard drive, please dump the drive using something like a BlueSCSI in Initiator Mode and check to see if the recovery partition is there! I would be super interested in getting a copy of the content of the partition, and it would be good for software preservation purposes for it to be saved for everyone.
Even if the drive has succumbed to the infamous gooey rubber bumpers and won't stay spun up anymore, there is an easy (but slightly terrifying) way to temporarily get it to stay spinning so you can dump it. If anyone needs any assistance with dumping the drive contents or going over the results to see if the recovery partition is still intact, please let me know!
Thank you!
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