[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[gene heskett]

On Sunday, February 12, 2012 10:21:17 PM Brett Gordon did opine:

> Maybe cobbler can be changed a bit to add a command line switch to
> ignore the track 34 install of the REL/BOOT/KRN combo.  It won't find
> them anymore in memory with a bootup from CoCoBoot.  Track 34 stuff
> should still be in there for the people wishing to keep support for
> the old-school booting.
> 
> That's quite neat that cobbler reads the module layout from memory.
> Good Stuff.  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!
> 
> 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.

No, if you have a hard drive, it is likely more than 1.  I have two HD's on 
mine, one is half for hdb-dos so its running the first half a gig a a 
cluster size of 4, and the other, otherwise identical drive is a gig, 
running at a cluster size of 16.  They work fine AFTER I undid Kevins 1988? 
"Christmas Present" which removed that capability from rbf.mn.

That fixin has been in nitros9 for quite a spell now.  I put it back in 
when I did the original conversion of rbf.mn to make use of the 6309 
commands, and then Boisy put in conditional assembly stuff so it builds for 
either cpu, and has for at least a decade now IIRC.
 
> The source for the wizard is under the "contrib" directory as
> "os9l2.fs" in the SVN at sourceforge if anyone wants to see.
> 
> I'll shortly be working on Nitros9 Level 1 booting, but I might take a
> break to mess around with Aaron's Virtual Serial Port protocols in
> DriveWire 4.
> 
Those are fun.  ;-)

> Brett Gordon
> 
> >Boisy G. Pitre boisy at tee-boy.com
> >Sun Feb 12 20:24:26 EST 2012
> >
> >Robert,
> >
> >Cobbler also writes REL/BOOT/KRN to track 34. With the new boot method,
> >>cobbler will probably fail.
> >
> >I envision a version of NitrOS-9 that is supported exclusively by
> >CoCoBoot. >This version would have no cobbler and no os9gen. What
> >version that will be, I >haven't decided.
> >
> >Best Regards,
> >Boisy G. Pitre
> >
> >>On Feb 12, 2012, at 7:20 PM, Robert Gault wrote:
> >> Cobbler does more than set a pointer to OS9Boot in LSN0. Cobbler
> >> takes >>the modules as they exist in memory and creates a new
> >> OS9Boot file. This >>means you can change descriptors in memory with
> >> programs like dmode, >>tmode, wmode, and xmode and after using
> >> cobbler the changes will be >>"permanent".
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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