[Coco] NitrOS-9 on CoCo SDC (was: Building NitrOS-9 on Mac OS X)

[Darren A]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 9:25 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:

> > On Jan 21, 2015, at 10:17 AM, tim lindner wrote:
> >
> > In a previous message I see you mention finding sdir and sdrive. You
> > also said sdir gave you an error #214.
> >
> > I just tried them here on a fresh build and sdir was working for me.
> > I've been meaning to finish up these utilities. Including making a
> > 'sdcimage' to create disk images.
>
> Yeah, I couldn't get either of them to work for me. I expect it's a
> Multi-Pak slot issue or something -- not able to access the SDC hardware
> when it pokes around the FF40 ranges. I'll do more exploring tonight.
>


Tim's sdir and sdrive utilities will not work with the latest driver when
using an MPI because the slot containing the CoCo SDC is no longer active
by default.


> /sd0 and /sd1 uses llcocosdc to talke to the SDC in LBA mode.
>
> Is there a bit in the descriptor for that? I assume the CoCoSDC "boot"
> module does it's own thing, then once OS-9 takes over, you could run it
> either LBA mode or floppy emulation mode? Thus, the /sdX descriptors are
> hard drive descriptors rather than floppy emulation descriptors...?
>


The /d0 and /d1 device descriptors should not be used to access the SD card
when the SDC driver and descriptors are present in the system.  The new
MPI-aware driver will preclude the use of the floppy descriptors when
running on a system with an MPI.  When connected directly to the CoCo you
can still use both /dx and /sdx to access the SD card, but you shouldn't.
This is dangerous since critical data such as the directory or alloaction
table may end up being modified and cached separately by each driver.

- Darren