[HN Gopher] Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 199...
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been
found
Author : chmaynard
Score : 277 points
Date : 2025-03-16 00:07 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
| userbinator wrote:
| _How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to
| boot after the OS was trashed?_
|
| In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made
| and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the
| main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy
| to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one
| shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional
| copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era,
| I'd make all my floppies bootable.
|
| Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that
| point in the form of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one
| file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux
| system on every USB drive you own.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Yeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to
| create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because
| floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
| bartvk wrote:
| Oh wow yes, you made me remember I didn't much like that.
| Money was tight as a teenager and it always hurt a little to
| "spend" floppy disks on multiple copies.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| That's what all those commercial demo disks were for, or
| AOL disks for those in regions where that was a thing.
| technothrasher wrote:
| A little bit earlier, but I remember dumpster diving behind
| a big company in the early 80's and finding a couple boxes
| of probably about 200 blank floppies. Couldn't believe my
| score! I pretty quickly found out about half of them were
| bad, which was probably why they were in the dumpster. But
| still there were plenty of discs for Apple II games copied
| from all my friends.
| donnachangstein wrote:
| Pretty sure Packard Bell and Compaq had recovery partitions
| long before Apple "borrowed" the idea.
| userbinator wrote:
| IBM too.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| An equivalent feature would need to boot a hidden backup
| version of Windows 3.1.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to
| boot after the OS was trashed?
|
| Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just
| a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of
| seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of
| with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional
| without any kind of disk.
| bmacho wrote:
| Every popular OS has live boot, including Windows now. Linux
| has had it since the very beginning
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Yes. But from a disk.
| bmacho wrote:
| Ah you mean the OS is in the _ROM_ , soldered to the
| motherboard, maybe not even writeable. Sure, I don't know
| about that, maybe your example is the only one
| chongli wrote:
| Booting from ROM was pretty common back in the day. A lot
| of machines from the "golden age of micros" (late 1970s -
| early 1980s) would boot right up into a BASIC prompt. A
| full graphical interface was something else though!
| That's really cool!
| atombender wrote:
| Archimedes came out in 1987, though. And Linux has never
| booted a full GUI OS from _ROM_ built into the computer.
| Parent is not talking about CD-ROM.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Not from the very beginning. The earliest live boot CD I
| remember is "DemoLinux". Back then that was still a major
| hack. Now Fedora, at least, boots into live mode to run the
| installer from the full GUI.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux supported running off the
| CD as far back as 1993, but you needed a boot floppy
| because computers couldn't boot from CD at that point.
| When you installed it to your hard drive, most of the
| included software stayed on the CD, meaning that you had
| ~500 MB of software and source code permanently available
| without taking up hard drive space. This was useful in an
| era when 200 MB and smaller hard drives were common.
| After installing, you could pick and choose which system
| components you wanted to move from the CD to the hard
| drive.
| kolinko wrote:
| Amiga was close to it, wasn't it?
| lproven wrote:
| No. The equivalent to firmware was in ROM in later models,
| but the OS was loaded from disk.
|
| It was unusually complete firmware, comparable to the Mac
| Toolbox, but you could not use the computer in any way
| without an OS that had to be soft-loaded.
|
| The Archimedes was a full multitasking GUI OS, in ROM. No
| disk of any form needed. It could join a network and load
| apps and save files to a server with no local storage media
| even installed in the workstation.
|
| This is why Oracle used it as the basis for the original
| network computer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Network_Computer
|
| The Pace company, better known for modems and set-top
| boxes, ended up owning a fork of RISC OS for this purpose.
| That fork is what led to the current fully-32-bit version
| and then, later, to the FOSS release.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The Amiga 1000 (that came before the 500) didn't have the
| "kickstart" in ROM, so you needed a kickstart disk for the
| 1000.
|
| The Amiga 500 and later had the kickstart in ROM and many
| of us would mod our Amiga 500 so that we could use a switch
| to select between kickstart 1.2 or 1.3.
|
| But even on the Amiga 500, that still wasn't a UI from ROM:
| you had to use the "workbench" disk to get the UI.
| xioxox wrote:
| I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS
| (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt
| revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical
| desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look
| at the source.
| znpy wrote:
| You could probably still do this.
|
| I remember a thing called menuetos, written mostly in
| assembly and fitting a single floppy drive while still having
| a decent ui and some drivers. You could probably fit that in
| a normal bios chip and/or boot it as a efi payload.
|
| Imo it's mostly about nobody having tried that yet (at least
| afaik).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I've been waiting for someone to do something more
| interesting with EFI. It's extremely capable and could
| easily host a minimal recovery environment that would be
| invaluable in many situations, particularly on laptops
| which might be out in the field away from recovery tools
| when things break.
| userbinator wrote:
| _I've been waiting for someone to do something more
| interesting with EFI_
|
| The recovery capabilities you mention have existed before
| EFI:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-on
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop_OS
| goosedragons wrote:
| The Macintosh Classic (the model named that) had a System
| 6.0.3 image in ROM. You had to hold down Cmd-Option X-O to
| get it to boot from that.
| klik99 wrote:
| The closest I saw to this was my Dads Tandy laptop in late
| 80s that had no hard drive - the OS (DOS) was ROM and the
| file system was RAM, you could boot up with no discs
| inserted. In retrospect it was a great computer for me to
| learn on since I could poke around freely and there was no
| chance of bricking it.
| sillywalk wrote:
| The IBM PS/1 model 2011 had PC-DOS + plus a limited GUI in
| ROM.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The Amiga could. The OS was in ROM.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Kickstart was in ROM (except for the A1000, where you loaded
| it from floppy). Workbench loaded from secondary storage.
| lproven wrote:
| This is not true, as I explained in detail upthread.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378500
|
| It never was true. I own one of the things.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _in that era, I 'd make all my floppies bootable._
|
| In that era, virus made all your floppies bootable for you.
| glimshe wrote:
| How many computers in 2025 allow you to use your external USB
| keyboard numpad as arrows? Not an Apple, at least not without
| convoluted system-level configurations or third-party software.
| Apple gets many things right but can still be infuriating on
| the simple stuff.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Why would you expect it to do that? There is nothing on the
| keys to suggest they should have that feature and the actual
| arrow keys are about 5cm away.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not sure how it is in Mac world, but in PC world the
| numeric keys have arrows (8 is up, 2 is down, 4 left, 6
| right), and you can activate them by pressing NumLock. It
| has been this way since at least 90s. Never used them
| myself, but I guess if you are used to them and they no
| longer work it can be infuriating. E.g. like VSCode
| removing Insert key functionality (always inserts, never
| overrides the text).
| Sunspark wrote:
| I am typing this on a 1987 Apple keyboard on a PC and
| this numpad functionality works. What I don't know is, is
| it because of Windows, or because of the ADB to USB
| adapter?
|
| The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate
| from that of the main rows.
| flomo wrote:
| Back in 1987, Apple sold a PC compatibility card, and the
| Extended Keyboard was designed to work with that. So I
| assume it always sent the correct scan codes.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| There are no arrow on the numeric island an Apple
| keyboard, nor is there a numlock key. There is a 'clear'
| key on the numeric island in the location where a PC
| would have a numlock key (it has the function of the 'AC'
| key on a calculator and functions as such in the
| calculator app).
| timewizard wrote:
| > but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional
| copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell)
|
| The files still had to be in the correct sectors. Hence the use
| of the SYS command to perform this.
| muppetman wrote:
| I love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding
| things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world
| if this is every fully understood or not. But it's their passion,
| and it shows. And I think that's wonderful.
| mmooss wrote:
| That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I
| don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they
| created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I
| assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage
| grabbing them.
|
| I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and
| slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
| labster wrote:
| I feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use
| as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great
| compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today.
| System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our
| desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.
| larusso wrote:
| UTM (the Virtualization and Emulation software for Mac) has a
| system9 image on their gallery which is easy to install. It
| also looks great.
| reaperducer wrote:
| But to do anything more interesting than boot up, it
| quickly becomes cumbersome and non functional.
|
| I'd love to use OS9 in UTM daily, but it's really just a
| tech demo.
| larusso wrote:
| Ah ok. I also only booted it up and checked old memories
| but nothing more. I did a simple network setup and wanted
| to know if the internet works (well with the security
| restrictions it has)
| danhau wrote:
| I will forever miss skeuomorphism.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I suspect it will return as we realize newer generations of
| people don't really know how to use anything? Maybe that's
| more of a hope than anything :)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I suspect newer generations will instead try to change
| the reality so that it resembles the digital world.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's been happening for some time. Look at how many
| touchscreens get used on things that shouldn't have them.
| ixtli wrote:
| same. I really thought the community made a mistake
| entirely rejecting the concept in the past 10+ years
| sbuk wrote:
| I'd argue it was a reaction to "rich Corinthian leather",
| yellow-lined notepads and green baize, which only
| appeared in Lion and Mountain Lion. The more subtle use
| of skeuomorphic elements (aqua buttons, brushed aluminum,
| etc.) was collateral damage.
| RossBencina wrote:
| > texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them
| physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
|
| That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was
| canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you
| could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just
| by looking at them.
| frereubu wrote:
| In MacOS There's an accessibility setting in System Settings
| > Accessibility > Display called "Differentiate without
| colour" that adds some extra affordances like on and off
| icons in the switches. I forget what else, but I always have
| it on because it makes things even more obvious in a way that
| it feels like OS programmers used to take more seriously in
| an era before the flat design idiocy.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There's another option for high contrast that makes things
| look more like old Macs. I think it looks better,
| regardless of accessibility considerations.
| lproven wrote:
| I think the "finder" in this needs to become a fully-fledged
| standalone project:
|
| https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG
| frereubu wrote:
| If you use MacOS, you can get some of that black-and-white
| feeling back by going into System Settings > Accessibility >
| Display, scroll down to Colour Filters, turn it on, change
| Filter type to Greyscale and set Intensity to High. I do this
| on my personal computer to try and make it less compulsive at
| weekends, to remind me that it's just a tool, and that there
| are other interesting things to do with my time. I'm probably
| getting old, but I also find this more restful to look at.
| Sometimes you need the colours because apps rely on it:
| although I can't remember how I did it now you can add an
| Accessibility Shortcuts item to the menubar which allows you to
| turn the Colour Filters on and off with a click, drag and
| release on Colour Filters.
|
| I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by
| setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level
| - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them
| back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a
| three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and
| off.
|
| Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting
| there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look,
| but although it does give different areas more differentiation
| I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat
| black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale
| textures.
| guestbest wrote:
| I do this with windows 10 for a tablet with a detachable
| keyboard to make it like an eink display.
| sbuk wrote:
| The texture in the title bars was definitely there as a visual
| cue, as much as to alert the user to the fact that the window
| beneath it was active. The title bars on inactive windows were
| unfilled.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Every time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I
| get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple's hidden
| recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here.
|
| Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor
| Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions--they'd
| fail if so much as to look at them.
|
| I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my
| computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the
| table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was
| the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was
| completely dead.
| supermatou wrote:
| Same here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss
| of an inestimable trove of software created between the late
| Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating
| systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a
| 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-
| boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely
| no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that
| period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less
| that a year after I bought it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The drive died on me with absolutely no warning
| signs,..."_
|
| Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's
| essentially what happened to the others--about a dozen or so.
| They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot
| or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't
| alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an
| unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to
| market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.)
| BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape
| streamers for backups.
|
| Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB.
| If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was
| only 40MB.
|
| Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by
| way of a data recovery service or such?
| blincoln wrote:
| Do you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the
| content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug
| it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a
| working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other
| than the platters" though.
| lproven wrote:
| Conner. With an E.
|
| https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Conner_Peripherals
|
| You might be thinking of _Terminator_ ...?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yeah, thanks. I ought to know by now. It's a double problem,
| the editor corrects to 'or' and my work colleague is also a
| 'Connor'.
|
| Right, perhaps the name ought to be _Data Terminator._ :-)
| ggiesen wrote:
| I remember another brand, JTS, from the 90's. While Connor was
| bad, JTS was the undisputed king of data loss. They didn't last
| long as a company.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| I'm not a classic Mac OS expert, but the way it works seems
| extremely convoluted and un-Apple-like. Instead of copying the
| mini system folder to the desktop and asking the user to copy the
| files to the real system folder, couldn't they just automatically
| copy the files to the system folder?
| Uvix wrote:
| If they did, users who customized their System file would
| complain that it destroyed their data.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Those users would probably refuse the recovery and boot the
| system from a CD/floppy to recover manually.
| donatj wrote:
| I remember using these CD caddy Performas in elementary school
| when they were relatively new and being somewhat confused by the
| why, as we had a tray loading audio CD player in our living room
| at the time.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It was to keep the CD-ROMS from getting scratched.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It was a misguided idea, and was quickly abandoned because
| obviously a CD-ROM is just as likely to be scratched when
| moving it from jewel box to caddy, as when moving it from
| jewel box into tray.
|
| The reason it was supposed to be more protective was that the
| industry expected everybody to buy a separate caddy for each
| CD-ROM they owned, so each CD would only ever be transferred
| once, and thus be scratched less. But caddies were expensive
| so obviously nobody ever did that (I'm not sure it even ever
| _occurred_ to most people), and manufacturers quickly
| switched to trays.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember an old rackmount computer at my first job, where you
| had a row of switches on the front, and you'd have to clock in
| the boot sequence, each time.
|
| It was actually before my time (but not by much).
| larusso wrote:
| Funny I watched a video from ,,this does not compute" where he
| worked on a rare Apple prototype. The drive had the very same
| issue and he fixed it the same way.
|
| https://youtu.be/OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn
| ixtli wrote:
| Absolutely incredible long read. I adore people who commit
| themselves to archival works like this.
| bijant wrote:
| If I were a Paul Allen-tier billionaire, I'd endow university
| chairs in 'Computer Archaeology' specifically for people doing
| this kind of meticulous digging. It's fantastic work, clarifying
| how operating systems evolved--though arguably just a bit more
| practical than crawling around ancient Greek ruins searching for
| fragments of the past.
| blincoln wrote:
| I definitely support the author's "make an image of the hard
| drive as soon as you buy vintage hardware".
|
| There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game
| prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every
| time the system is used, it's more likely to be overwritten.
|
| It's also a good idea because old drives could stop working at
| any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the
| same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without
| copying that drive image to a newer replacement.
| yborg wrote:
| Mac A/UX systems from that era created an 'Eschatology' partition
| for autorecovery. I always liked the name.
| dougg3 wrote:
| That's what that was? I noticed it while looking through the
| Apple HD SC Setup code and assumed it had something to do with
| A/UX, but had no idea. Good to know!
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