[Coco] Glenside IDE booting problems

[Willard Goosey]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 04:29:09PM -0800, Don Johnson wrote:
> I must be missing something here.  Has there been any updates to the
> drivers or documentation since they were first released?  I packed
> up the CoCo3 stuff shortly after getting them from Glenside and I
> may have missed something.
> 
Umm, if you're still using the 1.0 drivers, I'm not surprised it's not
working for you.  You really want Boyle's 2.0 beta drivers...

Glenside was supposed to put together a better release of them, but I
don't know if they ever did or not.  A quick glance at
http://www.glensideccc.com doesn't show anything.  My copy at
http:/www.sdc.org/~goosey/ is in a bit of a mess.  All the bits are
there, but you'll have to do some patching by hand...

If that would be a problem, maybe you should look at Cloud-9's
SuperDriver.  It says it supports Glenside IDE.  (Might be a better
way to go anyway, as SuperDriver supports the HDBDOS and the CD
filesystem and Boyle's driver doesn't, I think.) I haven't tried
SuperDriver myself.

AFAIK there's no way to completely boot OS-9 off the Glenside IDE
except via HDBDOS.  If you can read/write/lformat /h0, if you create
another descriptor that's /DD, the boot process should switch to the
hard drive after loading and starting /d0/os9boot and
/d0/cmds/grfdrv. If that step doesn't work, try fiddling with the
order of the modules in os9boot.  It seems to work best for me with
the descriptors immediately after the ccide driver.

Modern, compliant ATA drives seem to work much better than funky old
IDE drives.  I've had good luck with using the fast ATA 80-line cables
(extra ground-lines are always a good thing).  Even with a fully
patched OS-9 or up-to-date NitrOS-9, try to avoid clustering (there's
a lot of 3rd-party programs that will get confused by it -- and crash
the filesystem).

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard