[Coco] 248 errors in NitrOS-9 repository

[Lothan]

I'm leaning toward it being a bug in os9.exe. The reason I say this is 
because the output of make for the sierra christmas86_dw.dsk, I see error 
248 adding a few files to the root directory of this disk. The odd thing is 
that this disk has 2MB or more free and the root directory only has 8 files 
in it. I also checked the segment entries for the root directory and found 
the root directory has 8 sectors allocated to it. Strange.

Right now I'm trying to get into a situation so I can walk through os9.exe 
to find out why it's reporting error 248 on this disk, but it's been one of 
those days... I tried to install a missing zip package and Cygwin decided it 
needed to install gcc 4.7.3, so it won't build toolshed. I then moved over 
to an Ubuntu machine and it decided it doesn't want to boot for some reason.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Robert Gault
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 4:01 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] 248 errors in NitrOS-9 repository

I've found the cause of the problem but not yet the right correction. This 
problem of many disks giving 248 errors when being built started about the 
time that sysgo added a time stamp. That increase in size and also an 
increase in size of krnp2 has resulted in an OS9Boot file over $5000 bytes.
This bootfile size should not be a problem but the utility os9.exe seems to 
barf specially with game disks when a large number of .dat and text files 
need to be copied to the root directory. Many examples of this are in the 
3rdparty/packages directory, mostly in sierra.

A very quick workaround for this problem is to add to the OS9FORMAT 
mand    -c2   for these disks which will increase the the number of sectors 
per bit in the FAT. There won't be any 248 errors after this change. 
However, this should not be needed and must be a bug in os9.exe as one can 
easily add missing files to these disks while running OS-9 without changing 
DD.BIT.
A second workaround is to remove sysgo from the OS9Boot file. That requires 
more changes to the makefiles but does leave the disk format alone.
A third workaround which is more of a proof of concept than a real fix is to 
remove the dts time stamp from sysgo and use an older smaller version of 
krnp2 from a repository version that did not have 248 errors and had OS9Boot 
files less than $5000 bytes. Again the game disks will build without errors.

Robert

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