[Coco] NistrOS-9 doesn't want to boot

[gene heskett]

On Saturday, December 10, 2011 12:32:36 PM Robert Hermanek did opine:

> I've got some chicken and egg problems here I think.  A while back I
> ordered NitrOS disks from Cloud9, didn't read the fine print much.  It
> looks like they are 40 track double sided disks, and I didn't confirm I
> had double sided drives before I got them.
> 
> It appears I have single sided drives, confirmed that with some POKE's
> from DECB to enable the second side if it exists, and had no luck.  My
> assumption is that I have double sided 40 track boot disks, but only
> single sided drives that currently (because of DECB) can only perform
> 35 track functions via HDB-DOS and drivewire.
> 
> At this point (since I don't have a PC with a 5 1/4 drive that could
> write directly to disks) it appears that if I want to create a set of
> NitrOS boot disks, I would need two single sided 35 track DSK images
> that I could mount via drivewire and copy onto physical single sided
> disks in HDB-DOS, after which I could boot using drive 0 and drive 1 as
> separate physical drives.
> 
> So... does anyone boot NitrOS with single sided 35 track disks?  Or does
> it simply "not fit" in such a confined space?
> 
It fits Robert.  In fact the normal nitros9 boot disk generation utility 
script 'mb' more or less assumes an SS 35 track disk format.

With quite a few of us having much larger storage media available, having 
huge floppies to work on isn't so important, so to maximize compatibility, 
the boot disks we generate are all 630 sector 35 track formatted.  These 
disks, with the substitution of the boot module in the boot track to one 
that knows about the hard drive and can actually boot from it, can then be 
copied to a virtual floppy on the bigger media, like one of my 2 1 gigabyte 
Seagate drives, which effectively has 2 partitions on it, about 500 megs on 
the outside are devoted to os9, and inside that, there is room for another 
255 floppy images, leaving room for a 3rd partition of about 400 megs that 
I don't use.  Those of us with HDB-DOS and 40 track ds disks have most of 
the building blocks to do that easily.

But that also defines the chicken/egg problem you have here. I have a stack 
of floppy drives of both 5.25" and 3.5" sizes I can plug in and use, mostly 
collected (I'm an inveterate packrat) from old PC's being binned. The 3.5" 
however is hard coded for drive one because they are all built for the 'PC' 
market where the partially twisted cable makes the drive one on the end of 
the cable into a drive zero.

For you, I would suggest getting a pair of 5.25" drives from Mark at 
Cloud9tech.com, _and_ an HDB-DOS rom for your controller.  This, along with 
the SuperDriver kit in due time, will give you the ability to do all this.
Or, the hard drive and its controller can probably be skipped by going 
directly to drivewire.  Unforch I won't advise how because that is not the 
path I took.

The drivewire4 stuff opens many doors, I think Mark has a drivewire rom 
that can be put in the controller, which once the drivewire4 server is 
running on your pc, (its a java .jar, runs on anything with a java install, 
winders, linux, even mac's I think) and a cable from the pc to the bit 
banger port is plugged in, I think can actually boot your coco into nitros9 
directly from the selected .dsk image on the nitros9 web site that you can 
set in the servers GUI as disk zero!  I believe one could build a working 
nitros9 system whose only drives were drivewire links, no MPI required, 
just a cart with the drivewire rom in it.  The working 'drives' would only 
exist as files on your PC.  But building that would probably need 
bootstrapping drives while its being built.

I personally went with the HDB-DOS version because drivewire was not yet 
written all that long ago, so I may not be aware of the limitations if any 
in choosing to go direct to drivewire.  HDB-DOS, with its ability to use 
virtual drives located on a big hard drive as floppies, is at least as 
handy as pre-sliced bread or bottled beer IMO.

So, choose your poison and some of us will try to help.

> -Robert Hermanek
> 
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> Coco at maltedmedia.com
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Cheers, Gene
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