[Coco] working with the sdc

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 04 November 2018 19:19:19 Adam Coolich wrote:

> Gene,
> I think if you refer to the CocoSDC manual on
> http://cocosdc.blogspot.com/ most of your questions will be answered.
>
Following links from that site, I found Mr. Majors sdc explorer and 
downloaded the zip. But in order to unpack it, I had to a some renaming, 
linux can tolerate spaces in a file name, but apparently not the ().
So I fixed the fouled sd card with fdisk and gparted, restoring 
the /dev/sde1 partition.  But on page 2 of the readme.txt (which is 
still versioned at 0.48, whereas I downloaded 0.50)
but forgot to change the .bas files name to sdcexp.bas, which I've now 
done.

> That being said, I've been experimenting with running the CocoSDC
> alongside DW4 for about a month on my Coco3. The SDC DOS allows DW
> drives to be mounted in drives 2 and 3. So if you have something
> mounted in drive 0 in DW, then the SDC DOS commands are: DRIVE 2,#0   
>  (mounts DW drive 0 to SDC drive 2)
> DRIVE 2           (changes the focus to SDC drive 2)
> DIR

So it appears that I need to concentrate on setting up a 2Gb file on here 
so I can copy this sd to it, but first copy this nearly blank 2G card so 
I can then mount the copy to drive 2 in DW.

Probably best if I bring that oem card up here to a reader, and do the 
copy with dd, after I find the end of the data on it, then copy 
sdcexp.bas and sdcexp.bin to the end of that image.

Or am I makeing a simple job hard?

I have no clue how many "dsk" images are on the oem card but I'd have to 
assume its nowhere near full. But there must be some housekeeping going 
on else the next write will trash the card.

Guiding hands appreciated at this point.

> If you have a virtual hard drive mounted in DW, you can access an
> individual drive index like this: DRIVE 2,#0,125      (mounts index
> 125 from the virtual drive in DW drive 0)

And each of these indexes is a list of the contents of a vdisk?

> You can create a new .DSK image on your flash drive using the DRIVE
> command. DRIVE 0,"STUFF.DSK",NEW
>
> Now you can copy stuff from DW to the CocoSDC.
> COPY "FILE.BAS:2" TO "FILE.BAS:0"
> Or you can use the BACKUP command.
>
> If you want full DW 4 functionality, then you have to use HDB-DOS or
> Nitros-9. The good news is that you can boot either from the CocoSDC.
> I have HDB-DOS in one of the SDC's flash banks if I feel like using
> it. The manual gives the step-by-step instructions for flashing the
> SDC banks. If I want to run Nitros-9 I just use the SD card. There's a
> shell program called SDC Explorer that works great and makes it really
> easy to boot Nitros-9 (see the link above).
>
> There are SDC modules for Nitros-9, but I've only briefly explored
> them. I believe that you can do similar operations through Nitros-9
> once you've loaded the proper modules. So far I've read a disk image
> and copied some files from drive to drive in Nitros-9.
>
> Hope this helps you get started with the CocoSDC!

Its a start, but it appears I have many a row to hoe before I can get 
back to autobooting nitros9. But I'll keep plugging along, and no doubt 
pestering folks with what to experienced users of an sdc, are dumb 
questions. But I am indeed a beginner at this.

I'm going to find a small 3,5" cage, and mount these 2 spinning rust 
drives in it so that I may be to start them with a good bump sideways on 
the front corner of the cage, I've done it before with the old 120Mbyte 
maxtor 7120s, hundreds of such startups on it, so I should be able do it 
again long enough to dsave them to a fresh sd card.  If I can use a 4Gb 
sd card, so much the better.

So someone should plz advise me on the max size of an sd card I can use 
please.

Thanks everybody.

> Adam Coolich
[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
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