[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[gene heskett]

On Monday, February 13, 2012 06:55:22 AM Mark Marlette did opine:

> Brett,
> 
> All distributions from Cloud-9 to date have been a cluster of 1.
> 
> This is because there are several utilities from B&B that assume the CS
> of 1. Any thing else and poof, corruption.
> 
> The size limitations is around ~127MB for a partition. Anyone fill that
> up yet? :)
> 
> Mark
> Cloud-9
> http://www.cloud9tech.com

Possibly, when I made the transition from a Maxtor 7120s to the 1Gb 
seacrate hawk you saw over a decade back, I dsave copied about 85 megs to 
the seagate.  A lot of nitros9 related data has been added since then, but 
I haven't done the math on the results of a 'free' command recently enough 
to say that I am over that now.  Probably not as its no longer my daily use 
machine, but it does keep growing.  Packrat mentality at work. ;-)

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brett Gordon" <beretta42 at gmail.com>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 9:39:47 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting
> 
> 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".
> > 
> > Cheers, Gene


Cheers, Gene
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