[Coco] OS-9 loading NEW WAY

[Boisy Pitre]

> On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:33 AM, Brett Gordon <beretta42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My more-or-less normal installation of Nitros9 works fine with my
> partition tables. I just had to manually change my /dd descriptor to
> match the partition table's offset.  Boisy's Superdriver layer allows
> for a pre-filesystem offset.  It would be nice to modifiy SuperDriver
> to automagically read the partition table, though.   Another, "easy"
> way of allowing automatic Nitros9 configuration of hd partitions would
> be to have the booter (i.e. CoCoBoot)... make or mod the /dd and
> friends on-the-fly at boot (rather than loading them from OS9Boot ).

I would like to see a carefully designed plan for modifying LSN0 of an RBF device to handle partitions. In fact, I think it’s time for a newer RBF… XRBF… that would handle partitions natively and bring a number of other improvements (longer filenames possibly) to OS-9.

> Maybe the OP might have been refering to David Ladd's nitros9 ROM
> booter?  It's another "floppy-less" way of booting Nitros9, and a
> touch more traditional that my approach,   I think his work is
> somewhere in the Nitros Repo….

Errrr… David Ladd is a fine guy but the NitrOS-9 ROM Booter was my creation, not his.  I sold this through Cloud-9 for some years before giving it to the community in the form of open source (as I did with SuperDriver).

Let’s be careful about wrongly assigning credit. I know it wasn’t intentional on your part, and I’m not trying to toot my horn, but I firmly believe that work must be properly credited.

> -Brett
> 
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 6:34 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>> On Tuesday 21 April 2015 06:18:16 Tormod Volden wrote:
>>> 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
>> 
>> Working from memory, at 6AM with only one eye open simultaineously, the
>> area above $70 or so in LSN0 could be used.  I'll do some playing with
>> dEd on my 2nd drive just to be sure, but that won't happen just yet, I
>> am out of amps on the basement circuit so the coco is shut down until I
>> get a flood in a hard rain under control.
>> 
>> Cheers, Gene Heskett
>> --
>> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
>> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
>> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Brett M. Gordon,
> beretta42 at gmail.com
> 
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