[Coco] DriveWire

[Ryan Pritchard]

I realize I can keep looking for an MPI on ebay, but when I start looking at
all the various costs, I have to make some concessions at first, otherwise
it will be a long while before I get running any better than my two drive
setup running NitrOS-9 currently.

No easy way to get new programs to it, because my only working 5.25" drive
is actually an 80 track 720KB DD drive and my only working 3.5" drives are
1.44MB using the all too unrealiable 1.44MB diskette with the hole covered
to make the drive think I am using a 720KB DD diskette.

I have 3-4 of each 3.5" (720KB/1.44MB) and 5.25" (360KB/1.2MB) drives, I
just haven't been having a lot of luck getting the 5.25" drives to do
anything.  I technically have 5 working 5.25" 80 track 720KB DD drives, but
they don't help me if I get 35-40 track diskettes sent to me.

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Ryan Pritchard <coconut at pritchard.ca>wrote:

> Boisy,
>
> These responses from you and Robert are very informational.  Now I have a
> couple of questions.
>
> You have DriveWire 3 HDB-DOS ROM Pak available (and if I recall correctly
> had a DriveWire 2 ROM Pak previously).
> When you say ROM Pak are you saying a board with a ROM on it?
> Or are you meaning a ROM that fits into say... an existing 26-3029 FDC ROM
> socket?
>
> I am contemplating the idea of getting the TC^3 SCSI Controller or the
> SuperIDE Interface.  It looks like I could definitely use the TC^3 SCSI
> Controller on a Y Cable with my 26-3029 FDC.  It also seems that I may be
> able to use the SuperIDE Interface on a Y Cable, provided I either disable
> the SuperIDE flash ROM or have the 26-3029 ROM disabled and an equivalent
> ROM (DriveWire HDB-DOS) loaded in the SuperIDE flash ROM.  It would seem I
> could then keep my physical floppy drives accessible.
>
> Remaining concern for me is that I own a CoCo 1 and unless you provide
> DriveWire 2 still and my above presumptions are correct, there is no easy
> way for me to have access to virtual disk images, and physyical floppy
> drives and possible physical hard drives (or Zip drive).
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Boisy Pitre <boisy at tee-boy.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 6, 2009, at 7:59 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>>
>>  Boisy Pitre wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mar 5, 2009, at 9:33 PM, Ryan Pritchard wrote:
>>>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>>> Now where I get lost is that with DriveWire 2 you indicate I could boot
>>>>> strap NitrOS-9 from a DriveWire virtual drive.  Isn't the NitrOS-9
>>>>> Level 1
>>>>> boot diskette either 2 5.25" disks or 1 3.5" disk, since you only
>>>>> include
>>>>> one disk image for NitrOS-9 I presume you are loading the larger disk
>>>>> image.
>>>>> Does NitroOS-9 support for DriveWire allow for larger disk images?
>>>>>  whereby
>>>>> the virtual drives look like larger Hard Drives?
>>>>>
>>>> Yes, that is correct. Under NitrOS-9, you can format a DriveWire disk as
>>>> large as RBF will allow (4GB)
>>>>
>>> ><snip>
>>>
>>> Ryan, I'm not so sure that Boisy answered your question completely.
>>>
>>> NitrOS-9 has a module in the kernel on track 34 called Boot. This module
>>> is by default hard coded to read floppies. If you want to boot from a real
>>> hard drive via a scsi or ide interface or from a virtual hard drive via
>>> DriveWire, the boot module must be replaced with a special one to access the
>>> correct hardware. This is done for you (I think) by Cloud-9 when you
>>> purchase their products.
>>> The size of the drive where the main NitrOS-9 system is installed, is not
>>> dependent on the interface that talks to the drive as much as it depends on
>>> the actual OS-9 / NitrOS-9 software. The size of a disk is stored on the
>>> disk's first sector in 3 bytes indicating total sectors, DD.TOT. So you are
>>> limited to $FFFFFF sectors. The sectors don't need to be 256 bytes
>>> (standard) but that is still 4GB.
>>>
>>> So when booting via DriveWire or an IDE or SCSI system, you will still
>>> use a floppy. The floppy can be a virtual floppy in which case it is a 35
>>> track single sided image containing only the kernel on T17 and the os9Boot
>>> file.
>>> You can get a feel for this with several emulators using RGBDOS for
>>> emulators. Both the emulator version of RGBDOS and HDBDOS derive from the
>>> same RGBDOS sold with KEN-TON SCSI hard drive systems for the Coco.
>>>
>>
>> Robert,
>>
>> Thanks for the in-depth explanation.  Ryan, Robert is right.  A boot
>> module for DriveWire exists to get the bootfile from the DriveWire server
>> and bootstrap into NitrOS-9.  The NitrOS-9 disk image that will be supplied
>> over the weekend will have all of this set up.  You would simply mount the
>> disk image in the drive, bring up your CoCo into HDB-DOS and type DOS, then
>> the booting would commence.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> --
>>> Coco mailing list
>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Coco mailing list
>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Ryan Pritchard
> Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
>



-- 
Regards,

Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies