[Coco] Progress report my NitrOS-9 Coco 3 System

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that John T Chasteen may have mentioned these words:
>Hello Coco Friends
>Thanks for helping me to get my COCO3 System operational.
>The new IDE hard drive (300GB) mounted in a dual 5.25 inch
>pwr supply case with both floppy drives removed.
>
>Equipment operational is a 512k COCO3, MPI with new PROM,
>300GB IDE drive, Hardware converter to use a Flat screen Computer
>Monitor.
>
>Super IDE interface will allow me to get the IDE drive connected
>and operational. I also have to learn more about Cloud-9  DriveWire
>cable and software.
>
>Still haven't heard much on utilizing the 300GB IDE drive and dual
>boot procedure

<MODE="WideEyed">

   *utilizing* a 300G Drive?

</MODE>

I seriously doubt there was ever that much software available in the entire 
history of the CoCo...

That said, the largest partition OS-9 can handle is 4G. FWIU, you can have 
multiple partitions of 4G, but how much data do you actually plan on 
storing on your CoCo system?

Note: When I say "partition" don't think of it like an MS-DOS or Linux 
partition which are delineated in a table - think "manual offsets to 
multiple banks of data." If you later put this drive on a PC, it will for 
all intents & purposes have "random data" on it, and any PC operating 
system won't know there's any "partitions" on the drive whatsoever.

The "Dual Boot" procedure, assuming you're speaking about RS-DOS and 
[Nitr]OS-9, is detailed in the documentation - it's basically 1) figuring 
out how many "virtual floppies" you want for RS-DOS (max of 256 - that'll 
take about 81Meg of storage) calculating the storage offset of that, and 
telling NitrOS-9 to start formatting the drive at that offset.

Personally, I'm still debating setting up a 2G laptop drive I've saved for 
my CoCo - for my current needs, a 512Meg CF might be more than enough (with 
a few extra 128Meg CF cold-swappables in case I need more "virtual 
floppies" for RS-DOS, but as I've only used 10 so far... ;-)

Now that you've given us a bit more detail of the hardware you have -- what 
are your plans for software? How much are you planning on storing, and 
where will you spend most of your time, RS-DOS or NitrOS-9?

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com.         |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers