[Coco] Booting OS9 from Drive 1

[theother_bob]

----- Original Message ----
From: Stephen Castello <zootzoot at cfl.rr.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, October 5, 2009 11:01:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Booting OS9 from Drive 1

On Sun, 4 Oct 2009 19:06:03 -0700 (PDT), Derek <dml_68 at yahoo.com> had
a flock of green cheek conures squawk out:

>I am having a problem being able to boot OS-9 in the following configuration. I have an FD-502 Drive housing with a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive. My 3.5" drive is set as drive 0 and my 5.25" is set as drive 1. I have some old 5.25" OS-9 based disks that need to boot using the DOS command. I switch to drive1 and then type DOS. It starts to load OS-9, goes to the Loading OS-9 Screen but will then automatically switch to drive 0 trying to access the boot data on drive 0 and not boot from the 5.25" disk in drive 1. I have tried using the drive1 command to set it as the boot drive but no luck.
>
>Is there an easy way to make it so I can boot off drive 1 and uses these old 5.25" OS-9 disks without having to make a backup on to a 3.5" drive for each disk I want to boot?
>

One way is modify your drive setup.  Install a double pole-double
throw switch on the drive select jumpers on the two drives to swap
them as needed.
>



I will attest that this is indeed the most flexible method and well worth the minor effort of installing a switch. I even took the extra step to install a side-select switch (requires an inverter), so I could boot from either side of either drive. No byte-level disk patching required.

Bob