[Coco] Glenside IDE Controller Question...

[Willard Goosey]

>Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:07:24 -0700
>From: Randy Just <randyjust at comcast.net>

>After swapping out a few drives and changing my controller to a
>FD-501, the thing came to life.  While the IDE card was plugged in
>and power on, I changed the jumper to 70 from 50 and then the thing
>starting working.

You really shouldn't change jumpers while things are on.  Talk like
that make me cringe.  Please don't terrify me, I've had a rough
day. ;-)

>I am a bit puzzled as I thought the floppy was at 70 and per the
>Glenside doc, the jumper should be in the 50 setting with a multipak
>controller.  

Yeah, the Glenside docs kinda suck.  The dood threw them together, and
he clearly knew more about the IDE end then the CoCo end.

>Is there a step-by-step procedure I can find somewhere to get a boot
>diskette set-up where I can lformat the drive?
>
>Also, I see the update files for the IDE controller, but what is the
>process to get them copied to 5.25" floppy diskettes?  

OK, frankly, you've got some homework to do.  First, goto
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9 and download it.  The
Readme is a good introduction to transfering files and virtual disks
between CoCo and PC.  (besides, NitrOS is much improved over old
OS-9).  

Once you have a standard floppy-only NitrOS boot, the only other
software you'll need is the Glenside drivers and utilities, BASIC-09,
and a good text editor.

Run detect_ide.  Think about what it tells you.  How many partitions
are you going to create?  As I said before, 1-sector clusters are
good.  NitrOS can handle bigger clusters, but some of the old OS-9
software can cause problems because they all assume 1-sector
clusters.  Is the drive LBA compatible?  There's a bug in makedesc
concerning CHS partitions.  It's documented with the software on my
site and rtsi and maltedmedia but I didn't *fix* it in those files.

There are two versions of the driver, one supports 5 partitions and
the other supports 11.  Choose which driver you will use.  I've had
much better luck with the drivers which have the zero-sector bug
fixed.

Then run makedesc.  Something else not mentioned in the Glenside docs
is that device descriptor names are 3 chars. max.  Regular OS-9 naming
convention for hard drives is H0, H1, etc.

When you're done with makedesc you should have the device descriptors
saved on your disk as h0.dd or whatever.  Copy the descriptors into
NITROS9/6809LII/MODULES/RBF.  Copy the proper driver into the same
directory.  Note the file names.

In NITROS9/6809LII/BOOTLISTS, make a copy of standard.bl.  Call it
original.bl or whatever.  Edit standard.bl.  In the RBF section, add
the glenside driver and the descriptors.  

In ...6809LII/BOOTSCRIPTS, run the "mb" script to make a new bootdisk.
When that's done, use dsave to copy the files on disk 1 to your new
boot(use help to check the syntax of dsave, it has changed from the
original).  Add the glenside utilities.

Reboot with your new boot disk.  If the gods are pleased it'll boot
and you can lformat /h0.  

No, this isn't the quickest or easiest way to make a new boot disk,
perhaps, but it's the way with the most control and the most
educational.  Once you understand all of this, then you can play with
ezgen or whatever.

The last, and perhaps fussiest, step.  When you've copied stuff onto
/h0 and you're confident everything's working, you can make a new DD
descriptor.  Either use makedesc and be very careful to give it the
same parameters as H0, or edit a copy of your H0.dd with ded, changing
the name to DD (make sure the 0'th bit of the second "D" is set).
Make a new bootdisk, replacing dd_ds40 with your new dd_ide.  If you
can get this to work, it's the next best thing to having a IDE aware
boot ROM. When you boot NitrOS, it will load os9boot and cmds/grfdrv
off the floppy, then switch to the ide drive for everything else.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko