[Coco] Cobbler and ERROR 244 on CoCoSDC

[Robert Gault]

Allen Huffman wrote:
>> On Jan 23, 2015, at 7:59 PM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:
>>
>> To be precise, cobbler will check the contents of track34 and if it is other than a kernel, cobbler will error out. If track34 is free or is a kernel, cobbler will proceed and mark those sectors as used in the DAM.
>
> I've been reading things you wrote in 68 micros lately -- I need to dig all mine out and go through them. So many useful articles -- even one I wrote about OS-9 pipes I forgot about. Chet Simpson has one showing how to play multiple samples in the background on the CC3. Gotta find time.
>
> That said ... the sides confusion would make sense, and changing my descriptor did not matter since it is reading LSN0 to get the disk geometry (yes?).
>
> But, if I had a tool that manually went out to sector $264 and wrote it, and marked it used, maybe that would work. Maybe I can use dEd to try...
>
>> Also there is no reason why cobbler could not be made to work with a hard drive. The current problem is that cobbler was written for one or two sided disks. Hard drives such as the .vhd used with emulators have $40 "sides" which would cause problems with cobbler "finding" a T34.
>> For several reasons, it probably is better not to make a hard drive bootable if one can boot from the equivalent of a 'floppy' on .vhd drive or an SDC pak. You won't need to worry about fragmentation with /DD set to the hard drive.
>
> Alas, right now we don't have any CoCoSDC tools for switching disks from OS-9 (they have to be updated) so there's no way to swap once booted. Since I am in the phase of copying images to new images, I can't use both my drive slots for a boot and empty HD image.
>
> 		-- A
>

Consider that Disk Basic (HDBDOS) will need to find track 34 and won't know how 
to do that on a hard drive with multiple heads/side. Short of changing the DOS 
command (which we need to do with double sided .dsk emulation disks), how could 
you boot to a hard drive?

Robert