[Coco] booting OS9 from hard drive

[Robert Gault]

You could do it that way but the charm of HDBDOS and RGBDOS is that you 
can partition the scsi hard drive into two sections, OS-9 and Disk 
Basic. You can then put an OS-9 boot disk on one of the 256 Disk Basic 
"drives" so that the boot process is entirely from the hard drive.

If you wish to use the floppy to boot, then the standard floppy Boot 
module is retained. However, the os9Boot file must still contain your 
hard disk driver (typically HDisk) and a floppy driver (typically CC3Disk.)

Just read the documentation for HDBDOS from Cloud-9.
" Supports up to 256, 35 track single sided virtual floppy disks, 
depending upon hard drive size. 84MB gives you 256 virtual floppies.
  Enhanced keyboard editor with FlexiKey.
  Improved Disk BASIC syntax.
  Automatic program execution upon boot -- customize your startup!
  !!!!!!!Boot right to OS-9 at power-up from the hard drive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Co-exists nicely with OS-9 partitions on the same drive.
  Comprehensive user manual.
  EPROM version in 24/28 pin IC's"


Vern Burke wrote:
> Correct me if I mis-remember, but that would only apply to systems set 
> up to boot directly completely from the hard drive (ala the old CoCo-XT) 
> (yes, I have one and remember going through the tagtrack/bootport/zap 
> process :)). The C9 SCSI setup doesn't have any ability to do even a 
> partial boot of OS9 (up to the point of loading OS9Boot) from the hard 
> drive (I'm following the somewhat limited instructions with my C9 SCSI 
> controller).
> 
> My understanding of the process is this. The boot starts from the 
> floppy, loads the boot track, and loads OS9boot from the floppy. At this 
> point, device drivers and such are operational. Init and cc3go do their 
> thing to load shell and grfdrv from /dd/cmds (since I patched them that 
> way)(/dd is the hard drive descriptor) and then the boot finishes with 
> /dd set as the working directory and /dd/cmds set as the execution 
> directory. Not as neat as the old CoCo XT but it gets the job done.
> 
> In this process I wouldn't expect it to be looking for a boot track or 
> os9boot on the hard drive at all, which leaves me wondering just what 
> the heck it IS looking for. My kingdom for a debug! :)
> 
> Vern
> 
> 
 ><snip>