[Coco] booting OS9 from hard drive(an essay, by George)

[George Ramsower]

Vern,

  You have sparked something in my mind.

  The following is the result........


 I have one machine that I would really like to have it just boot from the 
hard drive into OS-9 from power up.
 Right now, I have to type DOS after power up.
 There's not much on the floppy except the stuff to just get it to switch to 
the hard drive and run startup. The default drive is /DD in the boot... uh, 
except for some special disks that keep the /d0 as the default drive. Some 
with and others without HDISK.
  I even have a boot disk that has no support for the keyboard and VDG. This 
one uses /T1 as /Term.  It's cool to see the monitor stuck on OS-9 Boot, and 
everything else shows up on the terminal. As time passes and I use more 
memory, the video memory gets used and the monitor begins show it.

  My terminals are Kimtron KT-7 units and this setup really looks and feels 
professional.

 I do have a lot of stuff for DECB, but I haven't used any of it in years.

 The reason I do the floppy boot is because:

 1. I have no other way
 2. I have more than one boot disk for different applications(different 
modules and module order).
 3. In an emergency, I can still start from DECB

  My wish list includes a ROM to boot directly to the hard drive after a 
short, timed menu option to do something on the keyboard(such as press F1) 
which would cause the coco to go into DECB. This way if there were a problem 
with the HD, I could still do something from DECB, such as boot from a 
floppy.

 I'm sure there are as many as nine people that would pay money for a ROM 
such as this.
 It would be a windfall profit for the person that would be willing to spend 
about a hundred hours to build this. This person could gross as much as a 
NINE HUNDRED dollars!
 After the grunt work of building a list of the hard disk controllers, 
asking the customer which one they want, burning the EPROM and shipping it 
out after testing it, the end result is about fourteen cents an hour. BIG 
MONEY! (I didn't actually do any math here. I only made up some numbers)

 I wish I had time to learn how to do the things some of YOU folks can do. 
Assembly is what I need to know, but I don't have time to learn it and 
develop some sort of style with which I could use to do the amazing things 
that are being done today with this machine. I write all my stuff with Shell 
scripts and Basic09. I know how to do that fairly well. Not a GURU, but good 
enough to get done what needs to be done(most of the time).

 I wish there was a ckt board that would plug into this PC that had an Coco 
expansion port in it. With an emulator which would support it,  I could be 
in Heaven!

 Another wish.....

 It's going to happen, and I'm waiting... a way to get email through my ISP 
from a COCO!!

 So far, NOTHING can replace my Cocos for the things I wish to build. I just 
can't do these things on this PC. I don't know how, don't have the 
technology and I don't have the time to learn how.

 By the way... my imagination is WAY different than most folks. Therefore, 
there isn' t much available today that fits into my desires.

 The "booting OS9 from hard drive"  desire is my desire.

enough.

George