[Coco] NitrOS-9 instant boot CoCo

[Frank Pittel]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 08:39:17PM -0500, Roger Taylor wrote:
> At 04:56 PM 8/5/2007, you wrote:
> 
> > The "problem" with booting from a ROM as Roger asks rather than a 
> >hard drive, is that you are locked into at least a specific kernel. 
> >That means cobbler and os9gen have lost some of their usefulness. 
> >It is important to be able to make changes to the core 
> >OS-9/NitrOS-9 modules at will as needed without needing to burn a new 
> >EPROM.
> > Using a CF card more easily reloaded with new code should be just 
> >as good as booting from hard drive directly.
> >
> > At the moment the size of a typical NitrOS-9 OS9Boot file plus 
> >kernel is about 12.5K. It would certainly fit into a ROM. However, 
> >if you plan to include the CMDS directory as well, forget it!
> > It is not enough to load just the OS9Boot file to run OS-9. You 
> >also need all of the commands and software. Where would they be 
> >without some type of drive system unless you use a very large CF card?
> 
> 
> My 42-meg CoCo HD was never close to filling up and it has 
> everything.  Wouldn't an 8mb or 16mb CF card be ideal?

I think you'll find that 8MB and 16MB are hard if not impossible to
come by. I'm using 256MB cards and am finding them hard to come by!!

I split the space between HDB dos and nitros and use drivewire for
storage. I know that the read/write cycles are into the millions or
read/writes per location on a CF card but I'd rather not "wear out"
the cf cards so I put as much as possible on my file server, ls120
drive or jazz drive. Interestingly since drivewire at least seems
faster I use it for just about everything. I want to eliminate the use
of floppies and use them as little as possible.

Frank