[Coco] MM/1 question

[David]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 08:23:59AM +1000, Bob Devries wrote:
> David said:
> > What version of OS9?  I think it's 2.4 ?  There was an issue regarding
> > maximum drive sizes.  IIRC, the max was _supposed_ to be 4 Gig, but a
> > header definition was made a signed integer rather than unsigned so you
> > only got half. the 2.9 patch was supposed to fix that, along with Y2K
> > and other bugs.
> 
> Yes, however, I think this particular bug will be in the BOOT ROM. Not
> something I can upgrade :-(

Yeah, that was what I kinda suspected.

> What *really* annoys me (someone tell me if I'm doing it wrong) is that the
> formatter completely ignores the settings in the descriptor. It must
> interrogate the drive, finds it has $208818 bytes, and formats it to that.

I guess this is a silly suggestion, you've probably already tried it,
but have you tried specifying the params through format command line?  I
think I saw in a previous post that you use a special format command, so
maybe it doesn't accept these.

> If the formatter wont format to less than the full size of the drive, I'm
> stuck with using the 20MB drive as the boot drive, and the 1BG as the data
> drive. YUK! Or booting from a floppy YUK,YUK,YUK!!!

Would it be out of the question to perhaps disassemble and patch the
format program?  This might be a bit hairy, though.  There may be some
IDE (I assume yours is IDE) commands involved.. I played around with
these a while back thinking about adding the facility to query the HD
about its parameters.  The drive holds a whole slew of info in a table..
like, the current SPT, and such.  Hmm.. You just might be able to store
a different "current" setup on the drive; the format program just may
read this rather than the capabilities. I think I started a little
utility to do this.  You might wind up with a trashed drive, but if
you're game, I'll see what I have.