[Coco] Drivewire/Superdriver feature request, and questions

[David Gettle]

Here's my request...

Be able to attach and access both SCSI and IDE drives and use them with
Superdriver to transfer files from SCSI media to IDE media.

and/or

Be able to assign a windows removable drive to drivewire for use by the
CoCo or an emmulator running NitrOS9 and be able to read native
OS-9/Nitros9 disk formats

The reason for this is I have all of my OS9 (level1 and two software, that
I purchased, as well as programs I wrote in C and Basic09 on a OS-9
formatted IOMEGA Zip 100 disk, and on a large quantity of 3.5 inch disks.
(about 25 meg worth of software and data) that I want to transfer to the
128mb CF cards I have plugged into my IDE card. But I really don't want to
spend several weeks swapping floppies and having to re-sort all that stuff
out again, it's sorted on the Zip disk. I would like to be able to boot the
machine with the drives attached and just dsave from the SCSI Zip disk to a
CF card, and let the CoCo do the work.

OR

can someone tell me how to get a CoCo3 to boot drivewire and SCSI Zip100
from floppy only and create enough virtual disks to transfer all this
stuff.

I have about a dozen Zip100 disks that I can use.

I did his when I first got the SCSI card and need to re-do it because the
SCSI drive I was using as H0 crashed, Mark no longer has the configuration
files for the SCSI system I had and doesn't have the time to re-create it
(Honestly I wouldn't expect him too.)

I have 3 128MB CF cards, I intend to leave the one I got with the system
unaltered in the event I mess something up, use one as a working drive, and
the third as a backup drive for the work drive. I intend to boot the CoCo
from Floppy then access the solid state drives (possibly using the Zip100
as a secondary backup drive) now that a newer NITROS9 distro is on the site
than what I have on the CF I received with the IDE card.

I typically use a mix of Nitros9, level2 and my own command replacements I
have a program I wrote in C I call MKTREECOPY that does a recursive file
count for each level of a directory tree, creates an alphabetically sorted
copy of the tree with the directory entries at the beginning of each
directory file and 10% more directory entries than the number of entries in
the directory tree being duplicated on all levels. During this process it
creates a file that has the names and file counts for all sub-directories
in the tree. Then it uses the data file to create the new empty directory
structure.  Once the new directory structure is created it deletes the data
file, then calls dsave to copy the files from the source directory to the
destination directory.

Once I have my system up and running again I may do a re-write of this to
eliminate the DSAVE call.

Having more than two hard drives on a system is great for developing tools
that do disk operations, and is the main reason I would like to be able to
use both IDE and SCSI without a reboot. Using floppy drives for developing
disk utilities takes too much time.