[Coco] Trouble booting nitros9

[Frank Pittel]

I am looking for a script or better yet instructions on how to
use os9gen to create a kernel for nitros and put it in the boot
sector of a floppy. The reason for my needing to do this is an
embarassing story of what not to do with a coco! :-(

While at the fest on saturday I managed to pick up a few things
from cloud-9. Amoung them a 6309 cpu and the nitros9 floppies for
the 6309. Since Mark kindly setup the CF card I had with both HDB
and Nitros9 for use with the 6809 that I was using I had never
actually needed to know how. With a brand new 256meg cf card in hand
I attempted to duplicate the configuration I had but for use with
the 6309. To make a long story short while trying to setup the card
with superdrive I managed to corrupt the superdrive disk I had and the
backup I made. I also managed to render the nitros9 floopies that I
had unbootable and to make things more fun mucked up the cf card that
Mark had setup so it wouldn't boot anymore. I thought I had a emergency
boot floppy for nitros but all it does is try to boot nitros on the
cf card that won't boot.

I think a large part of my problem is the result of a flacky floppy
drive. The reason I say that is the plans I had for sunday were dependent
on good weather. With it raining I packed up the offending hardware,
drives, etc and brought it to the fest hoping to get some help with
my problems. I met up with Boisy and he helped getting me a floppy
with superdrive on it that would boot. When I got home the first thing
I did was backup that floppy and proceded to try and fix the image that
I had on the cf card. After the first try of fixing things I tried
to boot off of the floppy again to try again. This time the boot hung
the same way it had the night before. When I went to boot from the floppy
Boisy had setup for me so I could make another working copy I found that
it wouldn't boot either!! :-(

After spending some time swearing I started to think about my current
situation and how I could get out of it. It occured to me that I had
nitros floppies that were bootable and made backups of those right away!
I then started to realize that although the kernel was corrupt I still
had the modules I needed to make a working system.

Here's my dilema. To date I am missing the most important tool that I'm
going to need to pull this off. That tool is knowledge. My intention is
to make an emergancy floppy that contains basic capabilities and tools.
These include a kernel that is capable of accessing the IDE drives that
I have as well as using drivewire. Included would be a reasonable text
editor. (ved)

My problem is that there seem to be a number of system modules that need
to be loaded. Does anyone have a list of modules I would need to include
or possibly a script to do this? I would also need instructions on how to
more the created kernel to the boot sector of a floppy.

Frank