[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[Robert Gault]

Brett Gordon wrote:
><snip>
> I'm finding it hard to find documentation on some of the
> standard os9 commands like cobbler, os9gen an the such.  I would hate
> to have to read (and understand) all the source!
>

What you need is a copy of the OS-9 Level Two Operating System (manual). All the 
commands are described and there is a technical section on the inner workings of 
system code.
You can probably find a .pdf file at
ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/MANUALS/TANDY/SOFTWARE/TANDY_OS9/
although I'm not sure which package is the correct one.

> I should point out that the existing incarnation of the Nitros9 setup
> wizard only works with RBF images utilizing 1 sector cluster sizes.
> From what I understand it is very uncommon to have anything more than
> this.
><snip>

One sector clusters is great for any size floppy but can be very wasteful of 
space on hard drive systems. If you want the new boot NitrOS-9 to be suitable 
for use with hard drives you really should be able to handle larger cluster sizes.
It is true that the default .vhd drives used with MESS and VCC use one sector 
clusters but that means 180 256-byte sectors in the allocation map. A more 
reasonable value would be 8 or more sectors per cluster for hard drives.
There is a trade off between a very large allocation table and files smaller 
than a single cluster wasting space.