[Coco] New system

[Chester A Patterson]

I used to work at Howard Medical in Chicago doing all the Coco and Tandy
stuff (hard drives and ram expansions for 1000HX and 1000EX). We sold a
bunch of B'n'B hard drive rigs, with and without the XT-ROM.
XT-ROM boots OS9 from track 128 or, if you hold down the shift key, track
129.
My personal rig (before I installed Cloud9 hardware and software) was one
20MB Seagate (noisy buggers!), one DTC-5150 HD controller, and one XT-ROM
installed.
Track 128 had regular OS9, track 129 booted Multi-Vue. Them were the days! I
had to format it all when I pulled it from storage several years ago.
That HD rig is now again parked and stored away for posterity. I'd sell it
but shipping this thing securely to the US (or elsewhere) from Costa Rica is
prohibitive.
It got so I could do rigs practically with my eyes closed. That was a LONG
time ago. Some of you may recall utility programs like EZGEN, which was a
very powerful bootfile (or any other file) editor, now I guess a clunker,
but since I know how to use it in my sleep I still prefer it.

You need a bootdisk. If my Coco were assembled and running at the moment I'd
make you a nice bootdisk. Alas, at this time I cannot. But everything you
need is available on the www. And I as well have it. If you wish, send me a
message off list and I'll send you the goods. Warning: It is a royal pain in
the butt for those uninitiated! Lots of reading the scanned original
manuals.

Chester
Costa Rica

-----Original Message-----
From: gene heskett [mailto:gheskett at wdtv.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 1:30 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] New system

On Friday, December 30, 2011 02:09:31 PM Bill Pierce did opine:

> Anyone have ANY info on booting OS9 on a Burke & Burke HD system?  I
> think it's one of their older systems. This has no ROM and I have no
> boot disk. It seems the original owner had a disk that booted it from
> Basic with "DOS"
 
What I can recall was that I only made it work once.  It works by loading 
whatever is on cylinder 132 IIRC, with an alternate load from 134 I think. 
(IIRC only if the XT rom is in it) But that's subject to my poor memory 
since there was apparently some oddity in the read timing of my very early 
kit, particularly when reading FAT sectors, so it would read a sector full 
of zeros from the FAT during about 1% of the writes it made.  That was my 
computers-101 introduction to maintaining an os9 file system with dEd, 
definitely not a pleasant time.

That was one of the original kits, probably seriel number 3 if there were 
such, a black sandwich of alu with post spacers, and with the RTC.  I even 
tried 2 different WD controller cards without effecting that problem.  But 
I later bought one of the formed, gold colored kits for my office machine, 
and that one has yet to drop a single bit that I know of.  It Just 
Works(TM).  And I still have that one.

I should have the disks, but TBT, the software is part of the Nitros9 tree, 
under 3rdparty I believe.  But I've no idea if the rom images are in there.

If not, its still usable but boots from a floppy.  In any event if the roms 
aren't there, I'm not sure how I could extract it from my working 
controller.

> thanx
> Bill Pierce
> ooogalapasooo at aol.com
> 
> 
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene
-- 
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