[Coco] Drivewire usage

[Glen Hewlett]

Hi All,

Firstly I think drivewire and HDBDOS are awesome and I would like to thank everyone who worked on creating them.  I’m pretty much a noobie with drivewire and I’m wondering if someone here could offer some advice for me…

I have my raspberry pi running as a drivewire server with two .DSK images.  On my CoCo 3 I’m using HDBDOS with Ed Snider’s CoCo PSG cartridge.  The two .DSK images show up fine on my CoCo3 using drivewire.  I also have drivewire setup so it auto syncs any changes that I make on the CoCo 3 which instantly updates the .dsk images.  The .dsk images on the raspberry pi are shared on my home network so I can access them from my Mac.  I like to use Lwasm to assemble my programs and then copy the binary to the .dsk image from my Mac using imgtool (which is an image tool that comes with MAME) and then it automatically shows up ready to test on my CoCo 3.  This is great!

The problem I ran into was my lack of knowledge with drivewire/HDBDOS and how it can be used to hold multiple disks inside one large .dsk image.  I wanted to backup some of my files from disk 0 on the CoCo to disk 1 on the CoCo.  So I did a DSKINI1 on the CoCo thinking that was going to use the 2nd .dsk file that drivewire was setup to use (or at least I thought it was).  Once the format finished I copied my files from disk 0 to the blank disk 1 and I thought to myself what if I try to access drive 2 on my CoCo?  Will I get an I/O error since I didn’t manually setup drivewire to use a third drive?  So I tried doing a DSKINI2 and it succeeded.  At this point I incorrectly thought drivewire made a third .dsk file on its own.  But what it was actually doing was creating multiple disk images inside my first .dsk file.  This is a great feature and from what I’ve read I can simulate 256 drives inside this one image.

The problem is I can’t access the files on the .dsk image anymore from my Mac.  I’ve tried imgtool (which is my favourite image tool) and I’ve also tried the toolshed tools and neither program knows how to access the files inside this new .dsk image that has multiple disk images inside it.

I’m pretty sure I can get the files and copy them to a new single .dsk image on my CoCo and use them again.  But what I would like to be able to do is still be able to access the files inside this big special .dsk image from my Mac.  Are there any tools that I can use that will allow me to read and write files inside the .dsk file once it is in this special mode?  I remember reading about .dsk images in other formats like DMK or VDK.  If I have to start again and use this format that would be OK as I really do like the way drivewire and HDBDOS are working together and it would be great if I can read and write to these disks from my Mac.

I hope someone here can explain to me the best setup I could/should use with drivewire and HDBDOS and still use these large disk images that contain multiple disks I sure would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Glen