[Coco] os9 copy is not reporting an error

[Robert Gault]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 14 December 2003 20:22, tim lindner wrote:
> 
>>Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>>Greetings;
>>>
>>>Tonight I tried to copy a new os9boot file into an otherwise
>>>working disk.
>>>
>>>Knowing that it must be contiguous, I first set the disks
>>>attribute for sas to $90.  The copy went nicely, but when I then
>>>checked the fd for the file preparatory to adjusting the data for
>>>DD.BT and DD.SIZ in LSN0, imagine my surprise when I found the
>>>file was split, the first allocation only being for $75 sectors,
>>>with the last $15 being 2/3rds of the way to the inner track.
>>>
>>>I've repeated this twice now, with the same result.  There is room
>>>farther into the disk for the whole file in one piece, so is there
>>>any way to "force" the issue and make copy behave as expected?
>>
>>Well, one work around I can think of is to plug the hole early in
>>the disk with a temporary file.
>>
>>Now on to the source of the problem. When you adjust the SAS field
>>to $90, what does that mean? I don't have my documentation here so
>>I need some insight.
> 
> 
> Setting "sas" to $90, means that any "creatafile" operations should 
> get a minimum allocation of $90 sectors (segments in the case of one 
> sector per cluster floppies anyway) in the *first* request for disk 
> space.  I did some more math, and there actually wasn't room beyond 
> the "hole" so I now have that disk being dsaved to an 80 tracker, 
> with an added last line in the script that made to get the os9boot 
> too.  When thats done, then I'll clean that disk out, and use the 
> same script to copy everything back to a disk that except for the 
> root dir and track 34, is effectively empty, but with the copy of 
> os9boot being the last copy done.  Then I can fix LSN0, and it should 
> boot.  The whole idea is to replace the os9boot file with the one 
> from my HD install, but with DD renamed H0 so it can't find the *&^5 
> startup file when sysgo looks for it.
> 
> Thats the plan anyway. :-)  If that boot works, then I should be able 
> to get back into the hard drive and fix the attribs on the file thats 
> stopping the bootup from it now.  If that works, then I can go back 
> to the automatic boot from virtual disk 128 on the HD.
> 
> Ya know, this can sometimes drive a man to drink...
> 
> Like why cannot I make "dsave /d0 /d1 ! shell" work?  It outputs the 
> tmode commands, cd's to the source, and simply exits with an eof 
> message, all in about 2 seconds, no copying is done.  But "dsave /d0 
> 
>>/d1/makecopy" works just fine to make the script, and the script is 
> 
> running just fine.  One of the reasons I never liked dsave from many 
> years ago, its got a mind of its own, but thats all I've got right 
> now.
> 
Gene, your plan seems much too complicated. As long as you can boot into 
OS-9 from a floppy and have the driver/descriptor for the hard drive 
also on the floppy you don't need to mess around with creating boot disks.

Merge the hard drive driver/descriptor into a single file. Load the 
file, iniz /h0, and you should be able to read/write to the hard drive. 
Once that works, just use dEd or attr as needed to correct the problem 
file on the hard drive.