[Coco] Trouble with nitros9

[Robert Gault]

Right, for OS-9/NitrOS-9 to boot there must be a Boot module on track 34 
of the floppy. On real floppy drives, Boot is hard coded to access 
floppy drive #0. Since you wish to boot from the HDBDOS "drive" 255, the 
  standard Boot won't work. You need a Boot that is hard coded to access 
drive #255.

You also need to tell the OS-9 portion of your hard drive, specifically 
LSN0 (logical sector #0) that the os9boot file is on "drive" #255. This 
is done with a special HDBDOS configuration utility. This utility needs 
to know the size of the OS-9 partition, adds to that the size of 254 
Disk Basic drives, and finally adds on the LSN of os9boot on "drive" 
255. The sum of these offsets is then placed on LSN0 indicating the 
location of the os9boot file.

If the above is still not clear, I strongly advise you to contact 
Cloud-9 for detailed specific instructions for formatting both your CF 
card and new hard drive.

Since your hard drive won't boot until there is a formatted and loaded 
OS-9 partition, you will have to boot OS-9/NitrOS-9 from a floppy making 
sure that the boot file contains a driver and descriptor for the hard 
drive. Then you will need to logically format the OS-9 partition, and 
install NitrOS-9 prior to any attempt at creating "drive" #255.

Frank Pittel wrote:
>snip>
> The way it was originally installed the 256meg cf card was partitioned with half
> being allocated for hdb-dos and 256 virtual disks and the second half was formated
> for nitros9. Loading nitros9 was done by means of a specially configured "disk 255".
> 
> Although I had a gut feeling that I should leave the virtual hdb-dos 255 alone I cleared
> it with a dskinit. My problem now is creating a "boot floppy" to backup into disk 255
> so that I can boot nitros9.
 ><snip>