If you are not familiar with MacSlack's current release version, you can read its documentation and/or download it. This beta has no documentation other than what is on this web page.
This software has not been thoroughly tested and may contain flaws. Please note that since this program can erase disks, any flaws it contains are potentially very serious. To be 100% sure you don't lose data, you should not use it unless you have backed up all of your online disks and stored the backups offline. To be "reasonably" sure you don't lose data, make a backup of anything that's not on your startup disk and keep the backup on your startup disk (MacOS will not allow MacSlack to format the startup disk).
Since many people are understandably squeamish about testing formatting software, please point this page out to anyone who might be interested; that way I hope I'll get at least a few brave souls to try it. If something doesn't work, I definitely need to know about it. Even if it works fine, I still want to hear from you, since it's important to know how much testing the program has gone through. Run it on old and pre-8.1 and pre-8.0 machines if possible, to make sure it catches the lack of certain system calls on old systems rather than crashing. Run it on a Mac SE with System 6 or 7.0. The final release date will depend quite a bit on how long it takes to accumulate a large enough testing sample. Please give me specs on any machine you test it on, and tell me briefly what features you tried on each machine.
Do not redistribute the beta of MacSlack. Instead, please direct any interested parties to this web page.
Click to download MacSlack 1.1b3 (187 StuffIt Archive).
1.1b revision history:
Known problems: There may be confusing error messages on MacOS system releases which have Filesystem Manager 2.0 but do not support HFS+ (currently, I don't think any such MacOS releases exist, but this still needs to be fixed). The erase preferences dialog is klunky, and should probably have a pop-up menu with allowed block sizes. Does not check in advance for silly problems that lead to errors later on--like trying to format a locked disk or the startup volume (should catch these before bringing up the erase dialog box at all). Does not check to make sure volumes support HFS+ before trying to format them (example: floppies are erased and verified, but then an error occurs and no filesystem is written because the current HFS+ formatter does not support volumes under 32 megs; hard disk volumes under 32 megs are left untouched, but the error message should be clearer). If HFS+ is not available, the Erase menu item should be dimmed; currently it is not (a check for Filesystem Manager 2.0 is used at the moment).
Problems with 1.1b2: On systems that do not support DIXFormat, the wrong error box is displayed; it provides no useful info about why the disk could not be erased (oops!). On systems that support DIXFormat but not HFS+, it appears that MacSlack's erase option may produce regular HFS disk under certain circumstances. The beta warning dialog goes off the screen on 512x384 screens (you can't see both the buttons). The erase preferences dialog is klunky, and should probably have a pop-up menu with allowed block sizes. Does not check in advance for silly problems that lead to errors later on--like trying to format a locked disk or the startup volume (should catch these before bringing up the erase dialog box at all). Does not pre-check that HFS+ is supported, only that DIXFormat is supported, which could (I haven't checked) lead to confusing error messages or regular HFS format under 8.0 and 7.6 (where DIXFormat should be present, but not HFS+). Does not check to make sure volumes support HFS+ before trying to format them (example: floppies are erased and verified, but then an error occurs and no filesystem is written because the current HFS+ formatter does not support volumes under 32 megs; hard disk volumes under 32 megs are left untouched, but the error message should be clearer). If DIXFormat is not available or HFS+ is not available, the Erase menu item should be dimmed; currently it is not.