HFSConverter is designed and tested under Mac OS X 10.4.11 PPC and Intel. The program provides a simple GUI interface for converting between case sensitive and case insensitive HFS+.
HFS+ is the standard file system for Mac OS X. HFS+ like HFS was originally case-preserving at its introduction. Meaning it retained the case of file names but when it actually checked to see if a file existed case was ignored. Starting in 10.4 Server Apple introduced the ability to formate using a case sensitive version of the file system. This was especial helpful to people moving files off case-sensitive UNIX file systems which might have “ESP” and “esp” as separate files in the same location. This would produce a duplicate file error copy to a non case-sensitive HFS+ drive.
Great if you have a drive your willing to erase completely. But what you already have data on the drive. This is where HFSConverter comes in. The changes needed to convert the HFS+ file system from case-preserving to case-sensitive are minimal. Going the other way however requires an extensive check through every file name to make sure no duplicates would be produced. HFSConverter can go both ways without losing any data. Before warned as with any disk utility of this nature it requires that the filesystem be in a correct and readable state. While every effort is made to guard against unknown or corrupt data on the disk this program is not a disk repair utility and as a result makes basic assumption about the state of the filesystem just as the OS does.
That being said HFSConverter is designed to fail safe even on unsupported filesystems. It reads all required data first if any error is encountered it will abort without trying to write any data. It will also abort if the expected marker values are not found. A write operation will only be attempted if the disk is determined to be an HFS+ partition. If an error occurs during writing it will restore the original state of the disk. Only Apple Partion or GPT drives are supported at this time. Drives with mutiple HFS/HFS+ partiations are not supported. Download the latest version here.