[Coco] booting OS9 from hard drive(an essay, by George)

[Robert Gault]

There are two ways to auto boot into OS-9 at power up, special ROM or 
RGBDOS/HDBDOS. Since I don't expect many people to burn EPROMs, I'll 
just describe what HDBDOS can do.

If you are using RGBDOS and the original Ken-Ton scsi system, or HDBDOS 
and a Cloud-9 system, built into the Disk ROM is the ability to 
automatically run the Disk Basic program AUTOEXEC.BAS at power up. 
AUTOEXEC.BAS can be as simple as a one line program and must be present 
on "drive" 0 of the Disk Basic section of your hard disk. The program is 
easily bypassed by holding down the SHIFT key during power up.

So, what will the one liner be for those that only use OS-9?
10 DOS1
Partition your hard disk so that there are only a few drives in the Disk 
Basic section. It could be as little as two. Drive 0 will contain the 
AUTOEXEC.BAS program and drive 1 could be your OS-9 boot disk with a 
special Boot module in track 34 so that there is access to the hard drive.

Personally, since I use Disk Basic as well as OS-9, my AUTOEXEC.BAS 
program is a menu which responds to single key presses. One of the 
choices is NitrOS-9 with the boot disk about drive 250.

In short, AUTOEXEC.BAS works exactly like a combination of AUTOEXEC.BAT 
and CONFIG.SYS in the Windows OS.

George Ramsower wrote:
> Vern,
> 
>  You have sparked something in my mind.
> 
>  The following is the result........
> 
> 
> I have one machine that I would really like to have it just boot from 
> the hard drive into OS-9 from power up.
> Right now, I have to type DOS after power up.
 ><snip>