[Coco] Creating a real floppy from a dsk image over drivewire

[Robert Gault]

Michael Furman wrote:
> 
> On Jul 31, 2009, at 6:28 PM, Michael Furman wrote:
> 
>> I have found myself without a linux pc with a real floppy drive and 
>> need to create a real floppy disk from a dsk image that I have on my 
>> Mac.  Is there any way to do this?  I have tried various things like 
>> playing with the drive on/drive off command in hdb dos, and also 
>> trying in nitros9 doing backups from /xN to /d0, and also backup f 
>> blah.dsk /d0 with no luck.
>>
>> Any hints?
> 
> Let me clarify a slight ambiguity in my previous message - I have a Coco 
> 3 with a pair of 3.5" drives attached and also have Drivewire 3 running 
> on my Mac laptop but lack my Linux PC that I would normally use to 
> create live floppies from the various .dsk and .os9 images I have around.
> 

It can be done but is not easy. Much depends on the size of the images.

If you are running OS-9 on the Coco, copying .os9 images is fairly 
simple with a hard drive system. You just copy all the files from 
Drivewire to your Coco hard drive. Then with Drivewire off, create a 
real floppy and transfer all the files.

Disk Basic .dsk images are the big problem. You more or less must use a 
RAM disk on the Coco, transfer files via Drivewire to the RAM disk, 
restart the Coco without turning it off (leaves the files in the RAM 
disk), restart the Coco without Drivewire but with the RAM disk and 
backup the RAM disk to a real floppy.

This all requires the Drivewire is not in ROM but is loaded from a Coco 
floppy or hard drive.

If you don't have a hard drive on the Coco, you probably won't be able 
to transfer images via Drivewire.