[Coco] Cobbler and hard disks was:Re: shell in NitrOS-9

[Robert Gault]

Gene Heskett wrote:

> Don't cobbler, that will write the wrong boot module, but os9gen from the
> later nitros releases can do this I believe.  In fact, I am going to go test
> that theory right now, brb.
>

If you are using RGB-DOS, RGBDOS, or HDBDOS, you can use cobbler. What 
you cobbler is not /h0 but /d0 or maybe /v0. Once /d0 is changed, you 
backup the floppy to a drive in the Basic section of the hard drive.

On my real Coco system, Ken-Ton scsi hard drives, I wrote a virtual 
floppy driver which can access the Disk Basic drives on the hard drive 
if they are OS-9 disks.
 From a Coco cold start, RGB-DOS looks for AUTOEXEC.BAS which in my case 
is a menu program permitting selection of OS-9 with a keypress. The ROM 
code then reads the boot track and os9boot file on drive 11 (scsi hard 
drive), and then continues the boot from the OS-9 portion of the hard drive.
If you don't want to use Basic, you could assign a single 35 track disk 
to the Basic portion of the drive. This disk could include both OS-9 and 
Basic formats to be readable from both systems. It would be simpler to 
just assign two Disk Basic drives, one for the AUTOEXEC.BAS and one for 
the OS-9 boot drive. AUTOEXEC.BAS could simply be
0 DOS1
and OS-9 would automatically boot when the system was turned on.