[Coco] OS-9 loading NEW WAY

[Brett Gordon]

My more-or-less normal installation of Nitros9 works fine with my
partition tables. I just had to manually change my /dd descriptor to
match the partition table's offset.  Boisy's Superdriver layer allows
for a pre-filesystem offset.  It would be nice to modifiy SuperDriver
to automagically read the partition table, though.   Another, "easy"
way of allowing automatic Nitros9 configuration of hd partitions would
be to have the booter (i.e. CoCoBoot)... make or mod the /dd and
friends on-the-fly at boot (rather than loading them from OS9Boot ).

Maybe the OP might have been refering to David Ladd's nitros9 ROM
booter?  It's another "floppy-less" way of booting Nitros9, and a
touch more traditional that my approach,   I think his work is
somewhere in the Nitros Repo....

-Brett

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 6:34 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 April 2015 06:18:16 Tormod Volden wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 21 April 2015 03:18:53 K. Pruitt wrote:
>> >> Yeah I saw Tormod's message.  I was unaware of the CocoBoot
>> >> project. I've been looking over the site and I am really impressed
>> >> with this project.  It is now bookmarked.
>> >>
>> >> Good work, Brett!
>> >
>> > Some good ideas there I believe.  The partition table thing
>> > intrigues me a bit, but its placement in LSN0, displacing the info
>> > there that Nitros9 uses pretty well wrecks Nitros9.  There is
>> > however, over half of that sector that presently has no use defined,
>> > and I see no reason not to make use of that area of LSN0 for a
>> > partition table.  Doing so could be useful to all levels of Nitros9.
>> >  We have a chd/cd, and a chx/dx commands, why not a cht/ct (chp/cp
>> > clashes with one of our copy utilities) command.
>>
>> Maybe put a pointer to the real partition table (and any minimum
>> geometry information needed) into the top bytes of LSN0? Then the
>> partition table can be placed at the end of the disk for instance.
>> That should be fairly backwards-compatible, bar reformatting the first
>> partition with "legacy" tools, and if that would happen the partition
>> table can be searched for and the pointer reinstated by a recovery
>> tool.
>>
>> Tormod
>
> Working from memory, at 6AM with only one eye open simultaineously, the
> area above $70 or so in LSN0 could be used.  I'll do some playing with
> dEd on my 2nd drive just to be sure, but that won't happen just yet, I
> am out of amps on the basement circuit so the coco is shut down until I
> get a flood in a hard rain under control.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> --
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
>
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-- 
Brett M. Gordon,
beretta42 at gmail.com