[Coco] Drivewire/Superdriver feature request, and questions

[Aaron Wolfe]

If you're using Linux or some *nix like OS, you should be able to "insert"
the device node in drivewire and talk directly to SCSI devices assuming the
logical sectors are just linear data like a floppy disk or hard drive is.
You could also copy the sectors off a device into an image file with a tool
like dd on linux or win32diskimage on windows and then insert that image
into a DriveWire drive.  You might need to mess with os9 device descriptors
to make os9 believe the "disk" is at least as big as the image has sectors,
but that should be all.  I haven't done this with zip drives, but have with
CF cards and hard drives.
 On May 4, 2015 6:11 PM, "David Gettle" <david17361 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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