[Coco] OS-9 loading NEW WAY

[Tormod Volden]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 April 2015 03:18:53 K. Pruitt wrote:
>> Yeah I saw Tormod's message.  I was unaware of the CocoBoot project.
>> I've been looking over the site and I am really impressed with this
>> project.  It is now bookmarked.
>>
>> Good work, Brett!
>
> Some good ideas there I believe.  The partition table thing intrigues me
> a bit, but its placement in LSN0, displacing the info there that Nitros9
> uses pretty well wrecks Nitros9.  There is however, over half of that
> sector that presently has no use defined, and I see no reason not to
> make use of that area of LSN0 for a partition table.  Doing so could be
> useful to all levels of Nitros9.  We have a chd/cd, and a chx/dx
> commands, why not a cht/ct (chp/cp clashes with one of our copy
> utilities) command.

Maybe put a pointer to the real partition table (and any minimum
geometry information needed) into the top bytes of LSN0? Then the
partition table can be placed at the end of the disk for instance.
That should be fairly backwards-compatible, bar reformatting the first
partition with "legacy" tools, and if that would happen the partition
table can be searched for and the pointer reinstated by a recovery
tool.

Tormod