[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[Mark Marlette]

Brett, 

All distributions from Cloud-9 to date have been a cluster of 1. 

This is because there are several utilities from B&B that assume the CS of 1. Any thing else and poof, corruption. 

The size limitations is around ~127MB for a partition. Anyone fill that up yet? :) 

Mark 
Cloud-9 
http://www.cloud9tech.com 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brett Gordon" <beretta42 at gmail.com> 
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com> 
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 9:39:47 PM 
Subject: Re: [Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting 

Thanks for the input Gene, Robert. I was under a false impression 
that near noone used more than 1 sector per cluster. I'll have to 
take a look at my CF that came with SuperIDE, and see just what my 
sectors-per-cluster is set to. Do LSN's then become cluster 
addresses? or is the cluster setting simply for the allocation 
bitmap? I do remember manually wandering through the root directory 
file, and wondering why 8 sectors where in the File Descriptor's 
Segment Count, but the file was only 4 sectors in length. 

Brett Gordon 

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 10:29 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote: 
> On Sunday, February 12, 2012 10:21:17 PM Brett Gordon did opine: 
> 
>> Maybe cobbler can be changed a bit to add a command line switch to 
>> ignore the track 34 install of the REL/BOOT/KRN combo. It won't find 
>> them anymore in memory with a bootup from CoCoBoot. Track 34 stuff 
>> should still be in there for the people wishing to keep support for 
>> the old-school booting. 
>> 
>> That's quite neat that cobbler reads the module layout from memory. 
>> Good Stuff. I'm finding it hard to find documentation on some of the 
>> standard os9 commands like cobbler, os9gen an the such. I would hate 
>> to have to read (and understand) all the source! 
>> 
>> I should point out that the existing incarnation of the Nitros9 setup 
>> wizard only works with RBF images utilizing 1 sector cluster sizes. 
>> From what I understand it is very uncommon to have anything more than 
>> this. 
> 
> No, if you have a hard drive, it is likely more than 1. I have two HD's on 
> mine, one is half for hdb-dos so its running the first half a gig a a 
> cluster size of 4, and the other, otherwise identical drive is a gig, 
> running at a cluster size of 16. They work fine AFTER I undid Kevins 1988? 
> "Christmas Present" which removed that capability from rbf.mn. 
> 
> That fixin has been in nitros9 for quite a spell now. I put it back in 
> when I did the original conversion of rbf.mn to make use of the 6309 
> commands, and then Boisy put in conditional assembly stuff so it builds for 
> either cpu, and has for at least a decade now IIRC. 
> 
>> The source for the wizard is under the "contrib" directory as 
>> "os9l2.fs" in the SVN at sourceforge if anyone wants to see. 
>> 
>> I'll shortly be working on Nitros9 Level 1 booting, but I might take a 
>> break to mess around with Aaron's Virtual Serial Port protocols in 
>> DriveWire 4. 
>> 
> Those are fun. ;-) 
> 
>> Brett Gordon 
>> 
>> >Boisy G. Pitre boisy at tee-boy.com 
>> >Sun Feb 12 20:24:26 EST 2012 
>> > 
>> >Robert, 
>> > 
>> >Cobbler also writes REL/BOOT/KRN to track 34. With the new boot method, 
>> >>cobbler will probably fail. 
>> > 
>> >I envision a version of NitrOS-9 that is supported exclusively by 
>> >CoCoBoot. >This version would have no cobbler and no os9gen. What 
>> >version that will be, I >haven't decided. 
>> > 
>> >Best Regards, 
>> >Boisy G. Pitre 
>> > 
>> >>On Feb 12, 2012, at 7:20 PM, Robert Gault wrote: 
>> >> Cobbler does more than set a pointer to OS9Boot in LSN0. Cobbler 
>> >> takes >>the modules as they exist in memory and creates a new 
>> >> OS9Boot file. This >>means you can change descriptors in memory with 
>> >> programs like dmode, >>tmode, wmode, and xmode and after using 
>> >> cobbler the changes will be >>"permanent". 
>> 
>> -- 
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> 
> 
> Cheers, Gene 
> -- 
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: 
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." 
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 
> My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> 
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> -- David Parnas 
> 
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-- 
Brett M. Gordon, 
beretta42 at gmail.com 

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