[Coco] A tale of DP Johnson's SDISK (OS9 Level 1)

[Rogelio Perea]

Been looking for the user manual for this for a long time. I have their
SDISK 3 edition's but not the one for Level 1.

More than a decade ago I inherited a bunch of disks and with them there
came SDISK, the CCDISK replacement for OS9L1 to ease the pains of setting
up a sensible floppy disk system on the CoCo. Managed to stumble upon the
process to install the new descriptors and driver... lots of ruined boot
disks until I got something that worked.

Been fine with it since then until this weekend when I had to redo the
Deskmate 1 system disk, I had it on a DSDD bootable SDISK disk - one bad
file (probably corrupted by a faulty MPI connection) had the system
behaving erratically, DCHECK couldn't figure it out so I decided to format
the floppy and COBBLER a new one from my L1V2 SDISK master.

Once the thing was done I copied all the CMDS contents into the new boot,
thought I was done when the boot failed upon trying it. After a moment of
"???" things slowly started to come back to me, maybe I need to run the
BOOTFIX utility on the SDISK disk as soon as a fresh boot file is put on
the new disk, before any additional files are written...

So I did and success, it worked. Now I have a decent Deskmate 1 system on
that tried and true CoCo 1 setup.

Thing is that I have been using SDSK blindly, would like to get a glimpse
of the documentation. The on-line repositories all seem to have SDISK 3 for
Level 2... any hints to the Level 1 manual will be greatly appreciated.


-- RP