[Coco] DriveWire

[Ryan Pritchard]

Boisy,

These responses from you and Robert are very informational.  Now I have a
couple of questions.

You have DriveWire 3 HDB-DOS ROM Pak available (and if I recall correctly
had a DriveWire 2 ROM Pak previously).
When you say ROM Pak are you saying a board with a ROM on it?
Or are you meaning a ROM that fits into say... an existing 26-3029 FDC ROM
socket?

I am contemplating the idea of getting the TC^3 SCSI Controller or the
SuperIDE Interface.  It looks like I could definitely use the TC^3 SCSI
Controller on a Y Cable with my 26-3029 FDC.  It also seems that I may be
able to use the SuperIDE Interface on a Y Cable, provided I either disable
the SuperIDE flash ROM or have the 26-3029 ROM disabled and an equivalent
ROM (DriveWire HDB-DOS) loaded in the SuperIDE flash ROM.  It would seem I
could then keep my physical floppy drives accessible.

Remaining concern for me is that I own a CoCo 1 and unless you provide
DriveWire 2 still and my above presumptions are correct, there is no easy
way for me to have access to virtual disk images, and physyical floppy
drives and possible physical hard drives (or Zip drive).

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Boisy Pitre <boisy at tee-boy.com> wrote:

> On Mar 6, 2009, at 7:59 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>
>  Boisy Pitre wrote:
>>
>>> On Mar 5, 2009, at 9:33 PM, Ryan Pritchard wrote:
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>> Now where I get lost is that with DriveWire 2 you indicate I could boot
>>>> strap NitrOS-9 from a DriveWire virtual drive.  Isn't the NitrOS-9 Level
>>>> 1
>>>> boot diskette either 2 5.25" disks or 1 3.5" disk, since you only
>>>> include
>>>> one disk image for NitrOS-9 I presume you are loading the larger disk
>>>> image.
>>>> Does NitroOS-9 support for DriveWire allow for larger disk images?
>>>>  whereby
>>>> the virtual drives look like larger Hard Drives?
>>>>
>>> Yes, that is correct. Under NitrOS-9, you can format a DriveWire disk as
>>> large as RBF will allow (4GB)
>>>
>> ><snip>
>>
>> Ryan, I'm not so sure that Boisy answered your question completely.
>>
>> NitrOS-9 has a module in the kernel on track 34 called Boot. This module
>> is by default hard coded to read floppies. If you want to boot from a real
>> hard drive via a scsi or ide interface or from a virtual hard drive via
>> DriveWire, the boot module must be replaced with a special one to access the
>> correct hardware. This is done for you (I think) by Cloud-9 when you
>> purchase their products.
>> The size of the drive where the main NitrOS-9 system is installed, is not
>> dependent on the interface that talks to the drive as much as it depends on
>> the actual OS-9 / NitrOS-9 software. The size of a disk is stored on the
>> disk's first sector in 3 bytes indicating total sectors, DD.TOT. So you are
>> limited to $FFFFFF sectors. The sectors don't need to be 256 bytes
>> (standard) but that is still 4GB.
>>
>> So when booting via DriveWire or an IDE or SCSI system, you will still use
>> a floppy. The floppy can be a virtual floppy in which case it is a 35 track
>> single sided image containing only the kernel on T17 and the os9Boot file.
>> You can get a feel for this with several emulators using RGBDOS for
>> emulators. Both the emulator version of RGBDOS and HDBDOS derive from the
>> same RGBDOS sold with KEN-TON SCSI hard drive systems for the Coco.
>>
>
> Robert,
>
> Thanks for the in-depth explanation.  Ryan, Robert is right.  A boot module
> for DriveWire exists to get the bootfile from the DriveWire server and
> bootstrap into NitrOS-9.  The NitrOS-9 disk image that will be supplied over
> the weekend will have all of this set up.  You would simply mount the disk
> image in the drive, bring up your CoCo into HDB-DOS and type DOS, then the
> booting would commence.
>
>
>
>
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>>
>
>
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-- 
Regards,

Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies