[Coco] bootlink progress

[Bill Pierce]

Gene,
 that sounds good. Between Drivewire, SuperIDE, SC^2, Becker, HDBDOS, & RGBDOS, there's a lot of different ways to boot. Sounds like you're making it possible to boot from either on a reboot. Am I right?
If you get it to work, why not give it a UI that lists ... say, any file in the root with the name "os9boot" i.e. "os9boot.dw4", "os9boot.sid", "os9boot.hdb"... etc. and be able to set the boot to use?

Bill P

Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Bill Pierce
ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sat, Oct 20, 2012 12:31 am
Subject: [Coco] bootlink progress


First, it's been since early 2008 when I last wrote any os9 assembly stuff, 
meaning my wet ram is bright red with rust. ;)

But I'm making progress I think.

The first thing it needs in the way of data is a copy of /dd's LSN0, and I 
have that working, with proof being I have it dumping the readlsn0 buffer 
back to a file that can be inspected with ded.

So now I have maybe 2 bugs, as it appears that dump doesn't like a filename 
like bootlink-trace, it won't dump it, but doesn't return an error either!
ded can look at it just fine, and the data is correct.

Yes, its a bug in dump, I renamed the file from bootlink-trace to 
bootlink.trace, and dump works just fine.  Makes me wish I had a gallon jug 
of an old insect killer called Cooks Real-Kill.

Tomorrows project will be to parse the command line and recover the vdisk 
number entered and convert it to a hex number in one byte.

No one has said whether they think this utility might be useful to them.  
Perhaps I haven't explained it enough?

>From the file header:
**********************************************
* bootlink.asm, Copyright 2012 by Gene Heskett
* A utility to facilitate using different
* boot vdisk images on a hard drive as the next
* default vdisk to boot from.  The boot sequence
* is this: load the boottrack from the default
* vdisk 128 image coded into hdbdos.  The only
* reason to change this is if one wanted to
* change the rel module from what is being used
* in the default vdisk 128.
*
* Once this is done, the boot module knows just
* enough about the hard drive to reach out to it
* and get LSN0 from it.  By reading DD.BT, and
* DD.SIZ, it knows where on the disk to get,
* and how much to get, to fetch the OS9Boot file
* from ANYPLACE on the hard drive.  This means
* that by re-writing the DD.BT and DD.SIZ values
* in the selected by the boot module drive, we
* can effect exactly the same as I believe that
* LINK.BAS is doing but which is hard to get to
* without doing a full reset into rsdos.
*
* The intention is to be able to do:
* >bootlink 129;reboot
* choose 1 or let it time out and it will reboot
* using the OS9Boot file from vdisk 129.
* instead of the default 128
*
* Caveat: be sure there is an OS9Boot file on
* that vdisk, else you will need to find that
* LINK.BAS and rerun it to restore your boot
* drives LSN0 DD.BT and DD.SIZ to valid values.
* I believe I would also keep a copy of ded on
* an all floppy boot, and restore from a postit
* note stuck to the monitor!  But that is just
* my normal paranoia about maintaining more
* than one rescue method. Insurance IOW :)

Perhaps that explains it better?

Comments welcome of course.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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