[Coco] Cloud-9 SuperIDE Interface

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that John T Chasteen may have mentioned these words:
>Hello Coco Folks around the World
>
>I'm getting my coco 3 setup ready for my new new SuperIDE unit.
>and just downloaded, printe and bound the User Manual.
>
>If you can give me any advise in using and setting up the hard drive,
>please let me know. This will be my first use of NitrosOS-9.

Advice WRT setup would be easier if we knew what size hard drive you plan 
on using - if it's at least 256Meg, I'd create 255 virtual floppies (which 
will take up 81Meg of the drive) and partition the rest for OS-9. Remember, 
OS-9 can't handle a single partition larger than 4G, IIRC.

There *might* be a way of doing multiple partitions of virtual floppies if 
you need more than 255, but frankly, with the SuperIDE, what I'd personally 
do is get a few cheap 64Meg Compact Flash sticks (which would give you 
around 190 virtual floppies each) and just swap CF sticks for which virtual 
floppies you need.

If you plan on going "all Compact Flash" you can pick up IDE->CF adapters 
cheap nowadays, and you could have 2 CF units running from your SuperIDE.

Please keep in mind: *Don't* hot-swap the Compact Flash units! Think of 
them as "dinky silent hard drives" instead of "picture storage" -> the 
manual does warn you not to hot-swap, but I thought I'd reiterate that!

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | A new truth in advertising slogan
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy...
zmerch at 30below.com          |                         ...in oxymoron!"