[Coco] Glenside IDE booting problems

[Willard Goosey]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 03:45:36PM -0800, Don Johnson wrote:

> For a first step I copied the drivers available from the Glenside
> disk to the module directory on a copy of the OS-9 Boot disk.  I
> re-named the cc3hdisk_16_50.dr driver to cc3hdisk.dr because after
> many failed attempts the config utility program in the next step
> seemed to be looking for that name. I did not re-name the h0_16.dd.
> 
Uh, yeah, the 1.0 drivers pretty much don't work at all.  I certainly
didn't have any luck getting them to work. You really want either
SuperDriver or the Glenside 2.0 drivers.

If you insist on the 1.0 drivers...

I don't remember if the old detect_ide builds a descriptor for you?
Or did you set up the descriptor manually?  Shub-Internet only knows
what the descriptors are set as off the distribution disk.

That's all I can think of.  I couldn't get the 1.0 drivers to work
either.  Unfortunately I don't remember if I got any farther than you
did.

> When I tried to boot into OS-9 with that system disk (floppy), which
> I believe to have been built with a hard drive device, it starts off
> normal enough with the 'OS-9 BOOT' message on the screen, and then
> shortly after that the word 'FAILED' appears below and the floppy
> stops.

OK, yeah, that's a boot failure, alright.  
> 
> That is as far as I have gotten.
> 
> There is no error message other than 'FAILED' and I don't get a

Yeah, the OS-9 boot process is a little... terse. ;-)  NitrOS-9 is a
very worthwhile upgrade (even on a 6809) for many reasons, one of
which a little more verbosity during boot. :-)

>I don't know if there is a /DD
> descriptor in the OS9Boot, and I don't know what the Init would be
> either.  Any help in how to figure these things out would be useful
> information as well.  I'm sure it is probably in the OS-9 manual
> somewhere but I haven't managed to read that far yet, and neither
> /DD or Init appear in the glossary or index.
> 
Init is a kernel data module.  You shouldn't have to mess with it.
/DD is the "default disk", which you almost certainly have.  On a
floppy-only Level II system it's usually /D0.  The descriptor is
ddd0_*.dd in the modules tree.

The closest a hard-drive equipped CoCo can get to booting OS-9
completely off the hard drive, without changing any ROMs, is to make
/dd be the hard drive.  Then, the boot track, os9boot, and
/d0/cmds/grfdrv will be the only things loaded off floppy.  Much
faster.  But you can worry about that after you get the hard drive
working as /H0.

> As I stated in my original message I must be missing something.
> I've read through the documentation sent with the interface boards

Unfortunately, the Glenside docs weren't very clear about the software
side of things.  Partially, I think, because the driver didn't work
very well.

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