[Coco] Nitros9 & Mess

[Robert Gault]

Bill Nobel wrote:
>  Hey all,
> 
>  I am trying to setup a Nitros9 system using Mess, but I am getting very 
> frustrated with the Virtual Disks.  I have a working boot on a 40trk SS 
> disk.  The drive descriptors in the boot are for 40trk DS disks and a 
> virtual HD using Alan's EmuDsk.
> 
>  I cannot seem to be able to format and disk with more than 1 side all I 
> get is error 242's for everything I do with the disks (format, copy, dir 
> etc...) am I missing something??  I followed Alan's instructions for 
> creating the virtual HD, but cannot format it.  I did jerry rig it to 
> work by modifying LSN0's density byte to $02 instead of $03.  This 
> allowed me to format the drive but copying files to it trashes the 
> directory when it needs to allocate more sectors for the directory past 
> it's default.
> 
> Any help is appreciated.
> 
> -Bill
> 
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> 
> 

Bill,

Emulators, at least MESS, have problems with low level formats because 
there really is no disk. Logical formats are not a problem. Therefore 
you either need to use a utility such as the MESS imgtool.exe or 
mkimage.exe to create the disk image. Once the image is created, the 
OS-9 format should work for a logical format.

There are other methods for creating .dsk and .vhd images. Any PC 
program that can extend a blank file to the correct length for an image 
will work. The correct length being whatever is in the OS-9 descriptor 
for the "drive".

If you can't make progress, tell me what size image you need. I could 
e-mail one to you.