[Coco] I've got DriveWire 4 installed

[Bill Pierce]

Wayne, first, it is never a good idea to load drivers "after" the boot file. This advise comes from many OS9 users past and present. The OS9 manual even states as much. This meaning loading temp drivers after you've booted into NitrOS9. Yes, it works, but yes, it can eventually fail. It's ok for testing or a quick fix for something temporary, but not for regular use. When OS9 boots, memory is allocated to the drivers and their descriptors in a permanent location in system memory. When you load them later instead, these locations are just temp locations in user memory and can easily be corrupted by other software being loaded. Not to mention they use much more system memory when loaded later.
The best solution is to have the drivers in the bootfile.

2nd, the emudsk driver is 100 times faster than the DW drivers so I would use /h0 as /dd. This gives you the fastest system drive possible. I've found through tests that the "TCP" port in DW4 for emulators is actually slower than the Serial port transfers used by a real Coco and DW4.

3rd, the emudsk driver and descriptors ARE in the repo under "3rdparty/drivers/emudsk". If you build your own NitrOS9 disks, these drivers are assembled, but NOT put on any dsk image. The assembled files can be found in the above folder after doing a complete build of the repository. Hopefully I will get a chance soon to create the patches need to have the repo build disk images for the emulators. This has been needed for a very long time.

In my "Starter Kits" for VCC & DW4, the VHDs are setup so that the system starts it's boot from DW4, then finishes on the native VCC HD using /h0 as /dd. This makes VCC the system drive, leaving you 4 data drives which can be swapped out at will.
These Starter Kit packages are "turnkey" systems in that after installation, the only setup required is to mount the 2 VHDs (one in DW4, on in VCC). NitrOS9 is already setup and ready to run.

 

 

Bill Pierce
"Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
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-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Campbell <asa.rand at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sun, May 28, 2017 11:14 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] I've got DriveWire 4 installed

Thank you Bill, Barry and Robert. I already have the emudsk disk image, soI just merged the H0.dd and EmuDsk.dr files together and put them in theCMDS directory on the boot disk in DW. It works, so now I have access tothe vhd image.On Sun, May 28, 2017 at 6:21 AM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:> Wayne Campbell wrote:>>> Thanks, Robert. That's done, so now how do I access my harddisk image? I>> did a mdir and see that /h0 and emudsk are not there. I'm guessing this>> means I have to build a custom boot?>>>>> Wayne,>> Yes, unfortunately there probably aren't many default .vhds for mounting> on VCC which will access DW4 disks nor disks for DW4 that once booted have> access to the default VCC hard drives. So, you will need to build a custom> boot file for best/safest access to both DW drives and VCC hard drives.>> There is one other thing you can try which may work but is not the best> approach. :) You can merge emudsk and h0 into a single file in your CMDS> directory. Set the merged file for execution ex.> attr VCCvhd e pe> and after booting from the DW4 disk, load the merged file however it is> named.> You should then be able to read the OS-9 partition of the .vhd mounted on> VCC.>> Now EmuDsk and H0 will not be on the nightly build Becker disk. You will> need to get those from your VCC .vhd or I can send them to you. The merged> file will need to be transferred to the DW4 boot disk.>> I just checked and Bill Pierce at> https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/the-color-compute> r-drivewire4-hdbdos-nitros9-starter-kit> in one of the VCC .vhd drives should have both the EmuDsk and DW driver> sets installed.>>> Robert>>> --> Coco mailing list> Coco at maltedmedia.com> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco>-- WayneThe Structure of I-Codehttp://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/The_Structure_of_I-Codedecodehttp://cococoding.com/wayne/-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco