[Coco] Feedback on NitrOS-9 V3.2.0

[Boisy Pitre]

Gene,

fdformat comes with the older fdutils package that is part of the Linux 
distribution (at least on RedHat).

Don't use superformat.  It seems to be useful to format PC disks only.  
Stick with fdformat.  Even if it says "40 tracks, 9 sec/track" it is 
still formatting at 256 byte sectors.

It seems as though your format did work, but you probably hosed the 
disk with superformat.  I'll email you the fdformat program that I have 
on my RedHat box; hopefully it will work for you.  Just redo the 
setfdprm and fdformat commands then do :

dd if=nos96309l2v030200_ds40_1.dsk of=/dev/fd0

And see what happens.  If no errors occur, then put the disk in your 
CoCo and see if it will boot.

Boisy

On Dec 9, 2003, at 5:38 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Tuesday 09 December 2003 17:36, Boisy Pitre wrote:
>> Since the discussions have skewed this direction...
>>
>> I've received very little feedback on this latest version of
>> NitrOS-9, which I can only interpret as a good thing.  Has anyone
>> had any problems booting on a real CoCo?  Has anyone tried the 6809
>> or Level 1 versions or is the 6309 Level 2 version the one mostly
>> being used?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Boisy
>
> I haven't managed to get iot anywhere near the coco yet.  I dl'd
> fdutils-5.4.targz, built it, edited the /usr/local/etc/mediaprm file
> to add the two coco formats, rebooted to the bios and told it that
> /dev/fd0 is a 5.25" 40 track disk.
>
> The bios spit out an error message and made me do a manual choice of
> boot device after post, which worked just fine.
>
> Then:
> [root at coyote root]# setfdprm /dev/fd0 coco40ds
> [root at coyote root]# fdformat /dev/fd0
> Double-sided, 40 tracks, 9 sec/track. Total capacity 360 kB.
> Formatting ... done
> Verifying ... done
> [root at coyote root]#
>
> So there appears to be NDW to get this chipset to do an 18 sector, 256
> byte sector format.  The verify phase's numerical output of tracks
> verified often incremented by several tracks at a time, so I wouldn't
> want to trust it 100% either.
>
> On checking the file date of fdformat, it was over a year old, so I
> deleted it, figuring it would find the next copy I supposedly just
> built.  Foolish me, it appears that was the only copy on the system,
> and it is not part of mtools-3.9-something, nor part of the
> fdutils-5.4 I just built!  So what package is that in?
>
> There was a 'superformat' built in the src dir of fdutuls-5.4/src, but
> running it with the --help option spits out more options than I've
> got screen space for, and says over half of it is obsolete, saying I
> should use a media_description instead, but no hint on howto do that.
> It also says that linux can only do 512 byte sectors...
>
> The manpage suggests I should just use a 'dd' as a format descriptor,
> so I did, but that never got past head 1 and hammered (literally) on
> the drive for 2 or more minutes to do this:
>
> [root at coyote fdutils-5.4]# src/superformat /dev/fd0 dd
> Measuring drive 0's raw capacity
> In order to avoid this time consuming measurement in the future,
> add the following line to /usr/local/etc/driveprm:
> drive0: deviation=640
> CAUTION: The line is drive and controller specific, so it should be
> removed before installing a new drive 0 or floppy controller.
>
>  Verifying cylinder  0, head 1 read: Input/output error
>  Verifying cylinder  0, head 1 read: Input/output error
> [root at coyote fdutils-5.4]#
>
> So obviously this road isn't passable.
>
> Suggestions?
>
> -- 
> Cheers, Gene
> AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
> Athlon1600XP at 1400mhz  512M
> 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
> Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
> by Gene Heskett are:
> Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
>
>
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