[Coco] NitrOS-9 Cobbler Problems

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 04 January 2010, Joel Ewy wrote:
>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
>
Great!  As for the staying up late, I find at 75 that I'm pretty well 
finished by about 1am these days.  With the aches & pains, and the gitup to 
pee on account of the (*&^% sugar, sleep is becoming a more valuable 
commodity.

>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.

I hope this was helpful?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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