[Coco] NitrOS-9 Cobbler Problems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 04 January 2010, Bob Devries wrote:
>One of the things I've found with the various NitrOS9 distros is that you
>can't make a bootable disk from the scripts, unless you booted from the
> boot disk in the distro. I don't know why that is, but that's what my
> experience has been.

Probably pointing out the obvious to some here, but If you look at the files 
supplied, there are several different 'boot' modules, IIRC there is one for 
floppies, and one for hard drives.  With dw3, there may be even more.

These have to be properly selected in the merge command that builds the boot 
track that will be written to track 34. Unforch, my local repo does not 
include, that I can find, an unpacked version of the .dsk image.

Don't forget too that there is a 6 byte rsdos header in front of the boot 
track that makes the 'dos' command work, and enough trailing $39's (rts's in 
machine code) to fill that file out to exactly $1200 bytes after the 3 byte 
crc of the last, krnp1? module.  This stuff I believe is already part of the 
files in the .dsk, but would be found if a directory entry for 'filename' was 
constructed on the disk that pointed to the boot track, and then a 'vfy -sk 
filename' was invoked on it.

The proper boot module is specified in this line of the scripts/mb file:
merge ../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/rel_80 ../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/boot_1773_6ms 
../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/krn>-bttemp

which in this case will install a boot module that knows about a floppy.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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