[Coco] Newbie questions

Wed Jan 22 17:58:04 EST 2014

Sean,
I think you've confused the use of Dsk images with VHD images.
RgbDos & HdbDos are BOTH designed to use a 256 partition Hard Drive image..
Each partition is formatted into an emulated 180k single sided, double density 5.25 disk. The drives referred to by hdbdos are NOT the driveslots in drivewire (more on this below).

You use a drive slot to mount a VHD (virtual hard drive) and then you can format (DSKINI 0-255) 256 floppy images on this drive. Do your floppy disk mounting in VCC cartidge menu (DRIVEOFF).

In this way, you have 256 drives in hdbdos (DRIVEON) OR 4 Floppies & 252 drives in hsbdos.
You can mount more VHDs in the other DW slots and switch to them with DRIVE #0-255 (NOT DRIVE 0-255)
DRIVE 6 will switch to "partition" 6 on the VHD... 
DRIVE #6 will switch to the 6th slot in DW (256 more drives)

You can not move files from one VHD to another without special programming and/or setup. Too much to get into here.

I know all this is confusing and it all needs different terminology to make things much clearer, but that's another argument we've already been through here a couple of times. And it was pretty..
The problem is that each part of the system was written by different people  with different goals and eventually someone made it all work together.

There's also a way to use each DW driveslot as a drive, but hdbdos doesn't see it this way

Now... in NitrOS9.... you can access each dw drive slot as individual large HDs or floppies..... But that's another story....

BTW... The hdbdos installed with Vcc 1.4.3b is specifically designed to run with the Becker port and DW. If you want to run Vcc without dw, just switch the configuration to RGBDos and do a cold start (hit F9 twice). <make sure "Enable Becker Port" is unchecked in the bitbanger config. The 2 OS's are "almost" identical

Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Wed, Jan 22, 2014 4:00 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] Newbie questions

Ok, so I've been reading the HDB-DOS 1.1 manual, and trying to get the backup 
command to work. The virtual ROM image I'm using is the one that came with the 
1.43 beta: hdbdw3bc3.rom. Now this ROM will not give me a command prompt unless 
drivewire 4 is running. It boots up just fine and beeps, but there is no 
flashing little cursor, and I can't type anything into the emulator. This is 
true whether or not I have the becker port enabled. If drivewire 4 is running I 
can enter commands. DISKOFF seemed to work with drivewire running, I could see 
the game with "dir" but when I tried to "BACKUP 0 to 4" I got an IO error, and 
now no matter how many times I do a hard reset, DISKOFF just returns an SN 
error. This is with HDB-DOS as well as RGB-DOS, with drivewire on or off. Stuck 
again I'm afraid.

On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 7:10 PM, Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com> wrote:

cool. I get it now. I also got a copy of the HDBDOS users manual now, thanks to 
Robert. Stay tuned for more goofy questions.

On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 6:20 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

Sean,
The answer to that is no. Driveoff just shuts down virtual drives 0-3 (of 256 
virtual drives) and allows access to 0-3 on real floppies. This allows you to 
copy to and from 0-3 (real) / 4-255 (virtual)
Drive on turn virtual 0-3 back on and turns of real 0-3

Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Jan 21, 2014 5:57 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] Newbie questions

Thank you all for the info. If I'm understanding
correctly RGBDOS doesn't allow 
access to the disk drives because it is substituting a hard drive for them. If 
you want the disk drives you have to DRIVEOFF to shut down the hard drive. But 
if that's the case, how does one go about tranferring data to the VHD (since you 

can't read a disk from a drive and access the hard drive at the same time)? For 
instance if I wanted to take DK.dsk and transfer it to one of the 256 partitions 

of Nitros9.VHD What would I need to do?

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