[Coco] HDBDos and Drivewire 3 question similar to the one posed by Nick

[Ed Orbea]

I also have have very limited "hands on" time with my Coco setup for several
months although I have been following the group messages. I plan to correct
this lack of hands on time over the holiday season
I have a CoCo3 with the 512k memory upgrade. My controller is a Disto SCII
with a Cloud-9 eprom (HDB-DOS 1.2 DW3)
I have used DW3 as well as it's predecessor DW2 to create actual NitrOS-9
floppy drives as well as create several RS-DOS floppy disks, but ti be
truthful it has been a while since I actually created the floppy disks. When
I have has some time to use my system I have just booted NitrOS-9 from DW3
(and even have used Aaron's DW4 to boot NitrOS-9).

I recently used the information provided by Willard regardin 'dd' to extract
individual RS-DOS disk images from an "HDB-DOS" 255 floppy disk image.

What I am looking for some assistance (even remind me of what I did a while
ago) in doing is to make a real diskette from a DSK image using DW3. When I
insert a DSK into DW3 drive '0' I can disable the physical drives by the
DRIVE On/Off command and can display a directory and execute programs from
the DSK file, but only when it is Drive 0 in DW3.

When I place the DSK file in Drive 1 or 2 or 3 in DW3 and try to display a
directory, all I see is what one would expect from a newly formatted disk
(no files and 68 granules free). On the DW3 server (Windows XP, SP3) I see
that the DSK file size is 161,280 bytes (163,840 bytes on disk).

My plans (but since I don't see in DW3 drive 1, 2 or 3 is why I am looking
for help) are:
Start DW3 server
load appropriate DSK file in DW3 drive 1
load formatted floppy disk in physical drive 0
Drive Off 0
Backup 1 to 0
then repeat for every DSK image I want to copy to floppy disk
It seems that even though I have a DSK file in DW3 drive 1 and have entered
the command Drive Off 0, doing a DIR 1 displays what could be disk 1 of an
HDBDos 255 disk VHD, even though there ar not other DSK files "mounted" in
DW3 except the 161,280 byte DSK file in DW3 drive 1

Secondly, using dd f(ver 5) for Windows, I can individually extract any/all
of the 255 HDBDos diskettes my using the following command: dd if=hdb.dsk
of=N.dsk bs=256c skip=N * 630c count=630c

Now, what I want to do is to use the same process to extract one/all of the
255 virtual diskettes in a VHD file (one that boots NitrOS-9 in VCC/MESS but
also has the 255 virtual disks). So I am looking for information about the
VHD image so as to peoperly use dd.