[Coco] funny discovery

[Wayne Campbell]

I looked again at the os9 archive for the level 2 version. I found that the master boot disk was indeed there! The Basic09/Config disk is named OS9BOOT.os9 and the master boot disk is named OS9SYSMR.os9. I put OS9SYSMR.os9 in as disk 0, and OS9BOOT.os9 as disk 1, and typed DOS.

It showed the OS9 BOOT screen with the black text and green background, then the screen went black, and a blue cursor showed up. I could tell I was at the first screen, but I can't see anything because the text and background are both black.

I tried entering the date (in 2-digit year format), it did something, but it's been too long for me to remember what happens when you boot off the system master.

Has anyone else had this problem? Know what to do about the screen colors?

Also, I want to set up a virtual hard disk in MESS to use as a bootable hd from OS-9. Because of the way the NitrOS-9 disk I am using is set up, I can't access a hard drive with it, and the only 720K floppies I can use have to be /d0 to be read. To create a new boot disk, I'm going to use OS-9 Level 2. I want to be able to use a hard disk image. When I had my CoCo3, I had a 20-meg hd that came with a Tandy 2000 I bought back then. I had it set up as my boot drive, and it worked fine. I want to do that with MESS. Can anyone help me with this, as I am at a total loss for how to do it, and MESS isn't very informative on the subject.

Wayne