[Coco] NitrOS-9 Cobbler Problems

[Joel Ewy]

I finally just mutilated a copy of the Drivewire NitrOS9 distribution 
disk to get my bootable image.  I still don't quite know what went wrong 
in the way I was doing things, especially after I decided to go ahead 
and use the stock mb.dw3 script, other than not booting from the same 
image as the one that I ran the mb.dw3 script from, as Bob suggests may 
be problematic.

But I finally got it to work at about a quarter to four last night.  I 
used to stay up that late routinely, but I'm finding it's not so fun 
anymore...

JCE

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 04 January 2010, Bob Devries wrote:
>   
>> One of the things I've found with the various NitrOS9 distros is that you
>> can't make a bootable disk from the scripts, unless you booted from the
>> boot disk in the distro. I don't know why that is, but that's what my
>> experience has been.
>>     
>
> Probably pointing out the obvious to some here, but If you look at the files 
> supplied, there are several different 'boot' modules, IIRC there is one for 
> floppies, and one for hard drives.  With dw3, there may be even more.
>
> These have to be properly selected in the merge command that builds the boot 
> track that will be written to track 34. Unforch, my local repo does not 
> include, that I can find, an unpacked version of the .dsk image.
>
> Don't forget too that there is a 6 byte rsdos header in front of the boot 
> track that makes the 'dos' command work, and enough trailing $39's (rts's in 
> machine code) to fill that file out to exactly $1200 bytes after the 3 byte 
> crc of the last, krnp1? module.  This stuff I believe is already part of the 
> files in the .dsk, but would be found if a directory entry for 'filename' was 
> constructed on the disk that pointed to the boot track, and then a 'vfy -sk 
> filename' was invoked on it.
>
> The proper boot module is specified in this line of the scripts/mb file:
> merge ../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/rel_80 ../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/boot_1773_6ms 
> ../MODULES/BOOTTRACK/krn>-bttemp
>
> which in this case will install a boot module that knows about a floppy.
>
>