[Coco] Multiple HDB-DOS 256 drive partitions Software Wanted

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 24 April 2013 10:23:02 Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus) did opine:

> afaik you cannot create more than on os-9 partition since it begins from
> bottom-up. how can you put two LSN0 ?
> 
Sure you can.  Absolutely not a problem.  In fact, I have in a pinch, used 
one of my scsi descriptors to temporarily point at a dsk file I had moved 
to a 1Gb drive, by modifying the descriptors offsets so they pointed at 
lsn0 of the dsk file.  I then cd'd to it, and ran the installation scripts 
to install the newer version of nitros9 on the other, first scsi drive.  
There is a bit, IIRC in the IT.DNS byte of the descriptor, that tells 
format when to query the drive for its size, or take the descriptors idea 
of the drive at face value.  One could theoretically take a 1Gib drive, and 
install 10 100 meg partitions on it if you wanted to.  Those 100 meg 
partitions would then only need a cluster size of one, whereas the whole 
drive as one partition needs a cluster size of $10, eg 16 clusters per 
allocation map bit.  Either way would work.

With nitros9 and the superdriver, and throw in hdbdos to sweeten the mix 
even more, and there are essentially no limits to what you can do with the 
os9 file system for either scsi or IDE based systems.
  
> the thing you can multiply is the 256-RGB disks, by poking a new hdb-dos
> offset. Check the last image I sent to you, it has a second 256-disk
> partition for mod player.
> 
Nitros9, using partition offsets,  makes this a piece of cake.  Currently 
the /sh descriptor is setup to match the starting address in LSN#'s of the 
start of the HDBDOS 256 disk area of your hard drive.  There is no physical 
reason one couldn't copy & rename sh.dd to si.dd, sj.dd etc, so as to be 
able to access, with unique offsets set in the descriptor, in one bootfile, 
a thousand or more virtual floppies, 256 at a time.  And _any_ of them 
bootable if you've os9gen'd them, and have a copy of my bootlink utility, 
downloadable from my site.

> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 6:23 AM, Kip Koon <computerdoc at sc.rr.com> wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > Now that I have figured out how to poke the MPI slot register to
> > activate the Floppy drives under HDB-DOS 1.1D LBA rom image in the
> > flash memory of the SuperIDE, I want to experiment with multiple
> > HDB-DOS 256 Drive partitions and some type of Huge Disk cataloging
> > program to index all the partitions in one big database file.
> > 
> > I have a 4BG hard drive connected to the IDE connector to try my hand
> > at formatting what I understand is the Largest hard drive capacity
> > NitrOS-9 can
> > handle.  It has over 8 million LBA sectors on it.  I might have to
> > partition
> > the HD into multiple NitrOS-9 partitions, but I'm going to try one
> > huge partition first after the HDB-DOS 256 Drives are setup.
> > 
> > I'm trying to find a DB9F solder connector in my spare RS-232 parts
> > and/or cables, but so far I have found nothing compatible yet.  I
> > know it's in storage somewhere.  I want to get Drivewire 4 Server
> > communicating with my Coco 3 SuperIDE setup.
> > 
> > Well, everyone have fun at the CoCoFEST.  Please let us all know about
> > the video feed so I watch it this year.  I had forgot about the video
> > feed last year, so I missed all the action.
> > 
> > Take care all and have fun Cocoing!
> > 
> > Kip
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene
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