Hi. I'm a relatively recent convert to Apple products. Until late 2005, I was using various of flavors of UNIX on all of my desktops and laptops -- and buying whatever cheap hardware I could find.

Since my first powerbook (a G4, or something along those lines), I have moved everything but my racked server to OSX. I have a Mac Mini on my desktop, a Macbook, and an Air. I use all of them every day, for work and for home use.

OSX and recent Apple hardware have literally changed my relationship with computers -- I have embraced a much better, but less direct, interface with the machine. I am happy to release control and marvel as my machines do nearly everything I need without work from me: mounting drives, ripping music, configuring (and remembering!) all the networks I need to connect to, and painlessly supporting problematic hardware (like cellular network interfaces).

Thanks.

The rest of the world, mostly software companies, haven't caught up. So here I am, trying valiantly to install recent Adobe software onto my Mini. Adobe CS requests a ludicrous thing from me: a diffent flavor of filesystem. They're unhappy with my choice that notices the difference between upper and lower case letters (I know, I'm such a pain in the ass).

With a little help from my friends, I know understand what hilarious and (in hindsight) utterly expected circumstances that lead to such a surprisingly stupid behavior in a piece of software.

I casted about for a while, and eventually decided there wasn't going to be a way to easily take my system volume and shift its filesystem to a new one (well, at least just drop an extended behavior). I figured a reinstall (and more pointedly the mkfs I'd get along the way) was the only solution.

Alas. It'd be much nicer if I could use the Disk Utility (or something like it) to accomplish a filesystem change in-place.

Or, if Time Machine's restore could be done to a empty, formatted volume without reformatting it. Perhaps some cleverly hidden advanced options dialog, rife with places where someone so inclined could twiddle dangerous settings like 'mkfs before restore' or arguments for all the commands I know that fabulous software is doing beneath the shiny surface.

Thanks, if any human has read this far: bless you. I can imagine how much noise pours through the sluice gate of a web form that submits data to people.

matthew