[Coco] Hard drive success! Now what about CD's...?

[Leon Howell]

After all that hastle with my hard drive, I *finaly* got it to work. It turns 
out the problem was in the drive select button on the back of the drive case. 
The old OS-9 hard disk drivers, like the floppy drivers, didn't have a drive 
not ready eror, so when they looked for the drive, they just kept 
looking...and looking...and looking...

The button is the kind found on most external scsi devices, with a little 
window with the number in it. It was set to drive 6, but I pushed the up 
button instead of down to see how many devices are theoreticaly possible with 
scsi, since I'd heard it was more than 8, and rolled it over to 1.

OOps.

Since the superdrivers are smart enough to tell if a drive isn't there, I kept 
getting error 246 not ready. So, just to see if it made a difference, I moved 
it up to drive 1, and tried that. Same error. Why did I decide to try drive 0 
again? It doesn't make any sense. but I did. Format asked the usual questions- 
and then a few more! Then it started formatting the hard drive!!!

IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS!!!

When I got done jumping up and down and yelling I copied everything to the 
hard drive and of course I still have room for more.

I noticed the instructions say it's compatible with CD-ROMs, and I was 
wondering, what good is a CR-ROM on a CoCo? There's no software on CD, but 
tons of data, like microsoft bookshelf and other book collections. Are these 
ASCII text, html, or any other CoCo-readable format?

What about recordable rewritable CD drives? I heard the original recordable 
CD's weren't compatible with the CoCo, but that was before the Superdrivers, 
and what about the rewritable ones?