[Coco] RGB/HDB-DOS drive swapping

[Steve Ostrom]

Boisy had asked me about a year ago to write this utility.  I finally 
had a chance to make a beta version of it over the summer.

A BASIC program to automatically copy all 256 virtual drives from the 
master hard drive to the slave takes about 7 hours.  My ML version takes 
2.5 hours.  This was not nearly as fast as I had hoped, but after a bit 
of experimenting I found that the slowdown occurs in the DSKCON 
routine.  For example, NOP'ing both calls to DSKCON in my ML program 
allowed the program to finish in about 30 seconds, so there is almost no 
overhead in the routine.  I could possibly rewrite DSKCON to speed 
things up, but it's not worth the time.

Like I said, it's only a beta version right now.  It will only backup 
256 drives from a SCSI master HD to a SCSI slave HD, with a zero 
offset.  Eventually it will be a bit more flexible, and maybe the small 
BASIC loader program could be updated to allow some more flexibility.  
It seemed to work very well for my use.  Mark has a copy on diskette, 
and if anyone would like to make a test, maybe he could e-mail copies 
out.  I could always send out the utility on a floppy disk, but since 
I'm not an OS-9 user right now, I'm not sure what changes need to be 
made to allow backups on an OS-9 system.  Maybe just the offset?

-- Steve --



Mark Marlette wrote:

> At 9/19/2004 01:33 PM -0700, you wrote:
>
> Steve Ostrom has made a HDB-DOS copy utility. He says that he has used 
> it to backup 7 or 9 volumes of his 256 virtual disk using this program.
>
> Steve????
>
> Mark
>
>
>> >
>> > All you need to realize is that drive numbers 0-3 don't use the RGBDOS
>> > HDBDOS special commands so only one type of special drive needs to be
>> > assigned at a time. That means any operation that can be performed 
>> with
>> > a floppy and special medium can be duplicated with RAM and the medium.
>>
>> Okay. In reading the manual... :-O  I see that DRIVE # command allows 
>> changing
>> drives. It looks like I could even simulate a ramdisk with variables 
>> and use
>> DSKI$/DSKO$ to copy any HD. Nifty.
>>
>> Thanks for the clue,
>> Bob
>>
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