[Coco] Disk sizes was make case sensitive?

[Bill Pierce]

Aaron,
 4.5 meg is also the actual "physical" size of the disk file. Not just the intended size. And most of all, it's not a DW or Becker disk. It's just a bootdisk for the superdriver (I think). The thing that gets me is that it's 85-90% empty. At 4.5 meg, that's 4 meg of empty disk. All that's on the disk would fit on a normal 720k disk. This has been recently added along with some others. The 6809 version of this disk is the same size.
 2 others are the uucpbb21 6809 & 6309 disks which are over 2 meg in size. Only 50% used.
 None of these disks are DW or Becker. The sizes I'm stating are not just the OS9 free reported size but the actual file size on my PC.
This is about 6-7 meg extra download time. Those with limited bandwidth or dial-up don't need to download a lot of empty space. I know I'm not the only one here with limited bandwidth.
The disks cannot be backed up to real disks of any kind. Does the normal OS9 drive descriptor even allow reading or writing to these disks properly without modification? Yes I know DW will read them, but not everyone is using DW. Some still use just the emulators or make real disks. We cannot assume everyone has a maxed out super Coco system with a SuperIDE controller and drivewire. I see new requests almost every week asking how to get disks from the PC to the Coco as we've had a lot of people coming back to the Coco. This is one of the reasons I have stressed making all the repo disks be standard Coco compatible sizes such as 35trk SSDD, 40trk SSDD & DSDD, and 80trk DSDD. That way if someone needs to copy these disks to a real disk, standard backup cmd will work. Yes I know there's a lot of ways to do this without backup... hence all the questions that flood the list and FB every so often on copying images to disks. There is not one disk in the repo I can backup to an HDBDOS drive to use as an HDBDOS boot without modifying it. You can only use a 35trk SSDD disk on an HDBDOS partition.
"First you have to make a boot on a 35trk disk...."Then we get into "How do you make an OS9 boot disk?".
And people wonder why OS9 was disliked by so many. It's because we as the OS9 community, expect others to already know how to use it. And in most cases... they can't even boot it. At least that's what I get from most messages and posts answering such questions.

Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sun, Jul 14, 2013 10:19 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] make case sensitive?


That looks like the format/size used when images are intended for use
with DriveWire.
DriveWire allows dynamic expansion of the image file as needed, so the
file on disk can be much smaller than the RBF filesystem it contains
is.  Typically these images will be only as large as needed to contain
the actual data needed, regardless of the "size" that RBF reports.
They will only require the same storage space as the filesystem
contains when the filesystem actually contains data in every sector.