[Coco] Backup CoCo floppy directly to PC using Drivewire & HDB-DOS?

[Darren A]

On 9/25/09, Robert Gault  wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> DriveWire can mount four images on your PC. These images can be either
> virtual floppies or virtual hard drives. HDBDOS for DriveWire expects
> that you are using either virtual hard drives on your PC or floppies on
> your Coco. The trick is to coordinate these two programs so that a real
> floppy will talk to a virtual floppy/hard drive.
>
>   As an example, let's say you have a floppy on the Coco in drive#0 and
> want to make a floppy image on the PC. You shouldn't mount a blank image
> in DriveWire #0 because you can't simultaneously talk to DW3#0 and
> floppy #0.


That is not correct.  There is nothing preventing you from using
DriveWire's slot 0 along with a real floppy disk under HDBDOS.  The
following will work:

DRIVE OFF 0
DRIVE #0
BACKUP 0 TO 1

This will copy the contents of the real floppy disk to the image
mounted in DriveWire slot 0.  However, it will be copied to the second
set of 35 tracks (tracks 35-69) within the disk image.  To move it
down into the lower tracks (0-34) you can do a second Backup
afterwards:

DRIVE OFF
BACKUP 1 TO 0

Now you will have a 70 track disk image containing two identical
copies of the 35 track floppy disk.

Darren