[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[Brett Gordon]

Thanks for the input Gene, Robert.  I was under a false impression
that near noone used more than 1 sector per cluster.  I'll have to
take a look at my CF that came with SuperIDE, and see just what my
sectors-per-cluster is set to.  Do LSN's then become cluster
addresses?  or is the cluster setting simply for the allocation
bitmap?  I do remember manually wandering through the root directory
file, and wondering why 8 sectors where in the File Descriptor's
Segment Count, but the file was only 4 sectors in length.

Brett Gordon

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 10:29 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> 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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>
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-- 
Brett M. Gordon,
beretta42 at gmail.com