[Coco] OS-9 loading NEW WAY

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 21 April 2015 09:33:21 Brett Gordon 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.

How did you do that, with the wpc/ofs pair of vars set at $000001?  I 
hadn't thought of that but it might just work!

But would that carry over to the bootfile location & size  in the new 
LSN0 or would we have to offset that 1 sector too?

> 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 ).
>
> 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....
>
> -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>
> >
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>
> --
> Brett M. Gordon,
> beretta42 at gmail.com

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>