[Coco] HDBDos and Drivewire 3 question similar to the one posed by Nick

[Aaron Wolfe]

The root of all the confusion over copying between .dsk and disks
seems to be that HDBDOS "drives" do not correspond to DriveWire 3
"drives".

A request for drive 1,2,3,etc in HDBDOS (DIR 1, etc) does not use
sectors from the file you have inserted in Drive 1,2,3 of the
DriveWire 3 server.

Instead, it uses sectors from the file you have inserted in DriveWire
3's drive 0, offset by 630 * the HDBDOS drive #.   For instance, if
you were to read sector 0 of hdbdos drive 1, you would be given sector
630 of the file mounted in DriveWire as drive 0, not sector 0 of the
file mounted in drive 1.

DriveWire 4 lets you map HDBDOS drives to individual files, so the
what you put in drive X on the drivewire server is what you get when
you deal with drive X on the CoCo side.  With DW3, you need to make
sure your disk image is at the proper offset with in a file to match
the drive # you want to use.


On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Ed Orbea <ed.orbea at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also have have very limited "hands on" time with my Coco setup for several
> months although I have been following the group messages. I plan to correct
> this lack of hands on time over the holiday season
> I have a CoCo3 with the 512k memory upgrade. My controller is a Disto SCII
> with a Cloud-9 eprom (HDB-DOS 1.2 DW3)
> I have used DW3 as well as it's predecessor DW2 to create actual NitrOS-9
> floppy drives as well as create several RS-DOS floppy disks, but ti be
> truthful it has been a while since I actually created the floppy disks. When
> I have has some time to use my system I have just booted NitrOS-9 from DW3
> (and even have used Aaron's DW4 to boot NitrOS-9).
>
> I recently used the information provided by Willard regardin 'dd' to extract
> individual RS-DOS disk images from an "HDB-DOS" 255 floppy disk image.
>
> What I am looking for some assistance (even remind me of what I did a while
> ago) in doing is to make a real diskette from a DSK image using DW3. When I
> insert a DSK into DW3 drive '0' I can disable the physical drives by the
> DRIVE On/Off command and can display a directory and execute programs from
> the DSK file, but only when it is Drive 0 in DW3.
>
> When I place the DSK file in Drive 1 or 2 or 3 in DW3 and try to display a
> directory, all I see is what one would expect from a newly formatted disk
> (no files and 68 granules free). On the DW3 server (Windows XP, SP3) I see
> that the DSK file size is 161,280 bytes (163,840 bytes on disk).
>
> My plans (but since I don't see in DW3 drive 1, 2 or 3 is why I am looking
> for help) are:
> Start DW3 server
> load appropriate DSK file in DW3 drive 1
> load formatted floppy disk in physical drive 0
> Drive Off 0
> Backup 1 to 0
> then repeat for every DSK image I want to copy to floppy disk
> It seems that even though I have a DSK file in DW3 drive 1 and have entered
> the command Drive Off 0, doing a DIR 1 displays what could be disk 1 of an
> HDBDos 255 disk VHD, even though there ar not other DSK files "mounted" in
> DW3 except the 161,280 byte DSK file in DW3 drive 1
>
> Secondly, using dd f(ver 5) for Windows, I can individually extract any/all
> of the 255 HDBDos diskettes my using the following command: dd if=hdb.dsk
> of=N.dsk bs=256c skip=N * 630c count=630c
>
> Now, what I want to do is to use the same process to extract one/all of the
> 255 virtual diskettes in a VHD file (one that boots NitrOS-9 in VCC/MESS but
> also has the 255 virtual disks). So I am looking for information about the
> VHD image so as to peoperly use dd.
>
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>