[Coco] booting OS9 from hard drive

[L. Curtis Boyle]

    The way I had my TC-9 set up (and Bill his Ccoo 3), was that the Boot  
track on track 34 came from the floppy, but the BOOT module was for the  
hard drive of choice, and the BOOT module will load the rest of OS9Boot,  
startup, CC3Go, etc. from the hard drive itself. Worked slick, and booted  
MUCH faster than just hitting the hard drive at the CC3Go stage.

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:34:21 -0600, Robert Gault  
<robert.gault at worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> You could do it that way but the charm of HDBDOS and RGBDOS is that you  
> can partition the scsi hard drive into two sections, OS-9 and Disk  
> Basic. You can then put an OS-9 boot disk on one of the 256 Disk Basic  
> "drives" so that the boot process is entirely from the hard drive.
>
> If you wish to use the floppy to boot, then the standard floppy Boot  
> module is retained. However, the os9Boot file must still contain your  
> hard disk driver (typically HDisk) and a floppy driver (typically  
> CC3Disk.)
>
> Just read the documentation for HDBDOS from Cloud-9.
> " Supports up to 256, 35 track single sided virtual floppy disks,  
> depending upon hard drive size. 84MB gives you 256 virtual floppies.
>   Enhanced keyboard editor with FlexiKey.
>   Improved Disk BASIC syntax.
>   Automatic program execution upon boot -- customize your startup!
>   !!!!!!!Boot right to OS-9 at power-up from the hard drive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>   Co-exists nicely with OS-9 partitions on the same drive.
>   Comprehensive user manual.
>   EPROM version in 24/28 pin IC's"
>
>
> Vern Burke wrote:
>> Correct me if I mis-remember, but that would only apply to systems set  
>> up to boot directly completely from the hard drive (ala the old  
>> CoCo-XT) (yes, I have one and remember going through the  
>> tagtrack/bootport/zap process :)). The C9 SCSI setup doesn't have any  
>> ability to do even a partial boot of OS9 (up to the point of loading  
>> OS9Boot) from the hard drive (I'm following the somewhat limited  
>> instructions with my C9 SCSI controller).
>>  My understanding of the process is this. The boot starts from the  
>> floppy, loads the boot track, and loads OS9boot from the floppy. At  
>> this point, device drivers and such are operational. Init and cc3go do  
>> their thing to load shell and grfdrv from /dd/cmds (since I patched  
>> them that way)(/dd is the hard drive descriptor) and then the boot  
>> finishes with /dd set as the working directory and /dd/cmds set as the  
>> execution directory. Not as neat as the old CoCo XT but it gets the job  
>> done.
>>  In this process I wouldn't expect it to be looking for a boot track or  
>> os9boot on the hard drive at all, which leaves me wondering just what  
>> the heck it IS looking for. My kingdom for a debug! :)
>>  Vern
>>
>  ><snip>
>



-- 
L. Curtis Boyle