[Coco] Drivewire usage

[Robert Gault]

Glen,

You can access information on DriveWire and HDBDOS and also download manuals at
http://www.cloud9tech.com/
in the support page. There are also some very good White Papers.

You probably should start by reading the above or just experiment with MESS or VCC emulators to see 
how HDBDOS works. I modified the original DOS that came with Ken-Ton hard drives to work with MESS. 
That DOS (RGBDOS) is what is used in MESS and VCC.
Cloud-9 purchased the rights to the original Ken-Ton software and sell hardware to support it.

HDBDOS originally supported two hard drives each or which could have an OS-9 partition along with 
256 "single sided drives" of 35 tracks. This did not exclude floppy drive support on the Coco.
Now that we have DriveWire, you can emulate Ken-Ton hard drives on your PC. Using DW, you can have 
many hard drives where each can have 256 Basic drives.

Actually a single hard drive mounted with HDBDOS can have more than 256 Basic "drives" as I have 
shown in the White Paper "Using Large Drives with HDB-DOS".

There are some tricks to moving files from one of the 256 disks to another. Without DriveWire, using 
a RAM Disk as an intermediary is one method but that is not very good with a stock Coco as memory is 
limited.
With DriveWire, you can Backup a "disk" on an HDBDOS drive to a "floppy", switch to another HDBDOS 
drive, and Backup form the "floppy" to the new HDBDOS drive.

You will be able to determine the right questions to ask after to read the documentation on the 
Cloud-9 site.

Robert