[Coco] Feedback on NitrOS-9 V3.2.0

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 09 December 2003 17:36, Boisy Pitre wrote:
>Since the discussions have skewed this direction...
>
>I've received very little feedback on this latest version of
> NitrOS-9, which I can only interpret as a good thing.  Has anyone
> had any problems booting on a real CoCo?  Has anyone tried the 6809
> or Level 1 versions or is the 6309 Level 2 version the one mostly
> being used?
>
>Thanks,
>Boisy

I haven't managed to get iot anywhere near the coco yet.  I dl'd 
fdutils-5.4.targz, built it, edited the /usr/local/etc/mediaprm file 
to add the two coco formats, rebooted to the bios and told it that 
/dev/fd0 is a 5.25" 40 track disk.

The bios spit out an error message and made me do a manual choice of 
boot device after post, which worked just fine.

Then:
[root at coyote root]# setfdprm /dev/fd0 coco40ds
[root at coyote root]# fdformat /dev/fd0
Double-sided, 40 tracks, 9 sec/track. Total capacity 360 kB.
Formatting ... done
Verifying ... done
[root at coyote root]#

So there appears to be NDW to get this chipset to do an 18 sector, 256 
byte sector format.  The verify phase's numerical output of tracks 
verified often incremented by several tracks at a time, so I wouldn't 
want to trust it 100% either.

On checking the file date of fdformat, it was over a year old, so I 
deleted it, figuring it would find the next copy I supposedly just 
built.  Foolish me, it appears that was the only copy on the system, 
and it is not part of mtools-3.9-something, nor part of the 
fdutils-5.4 I just built!  So what package is that in?

There was a 'superformat' built in the src dir of fdutuls-5.4/src, but 
running it with the --help option spits out more options than I've 
got screen space for, and says over half of it is obsolete, saying I 
should use a media_description instead, but no hint on howto do that.
It also says that linux can only do 512 byte sectors...

The manpage suggests I should just use a 'dd' as a format descriptor, 
so I did, but that never got past head 1 and hammered (literally) on 
the drive for 2 or more minutes to do this:

[root at coyote fdutils-5.4]# src/superformat /dev/fd0 dd
Measuring drive 0's raw capacity
In order to avoid this time consuming measurement in the future,
add the following line to /usr/local/etc/driveprm:
drive0: deviation=640
CAUTION: The line is drive and controller specific, so it should be
removed before installing a new drive 0 or floppy controller.

 Verifying cylinder  0, head 1 read: Input/output error
 Verifying cylinder  0, head 1 read: Input/output error
[root at coyote fdutils-5.4]#

So obviously this road isn't passable.

Suggestions?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP at 1400mhz  512M
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.