[Coco] Multipak and Drivewire

[Bill Pierce]

Michael, when using DW, HDBDOS and real floppies, you issue a "DRIVEOFF" cmd which disables dw drives 0-3. This does not disable drives 4-255! You can copy real floppies to and partition from 4-255. If you need to get them to 0-3, let's say you want to copy a real disk to dw slot 0. Use DRIVEOFF, copy the disk 0 to disk 4. Then issue DRIVEON, copy disk 4 to disk 0.
In fact, I always leave disk 4 as a temp disk for copying.
Now, there are other forms of the "DRIVEOFF/ON" cmd.
DRIVEOFF2 will disable dw drives0-2 and leave 3-255
DRIVEOFF0 will disable dw drive0 and leave 1-255
Any combo or driveooff 0-3 will work the same.

Also in DW, you can issue DRIVE #x where 'x' is any number from 0-255, which will change "partitions" and put you system on another DW slot. You cannot copy from one dw drive to another, drives being the DW slots, disks being the partitions.
There has been a lot of confussion from day one with DW due to the double use of "DRIVE"
DRIVE1 will set "disk 1" as the default
DRIVE#1 will set DW drive slot as default and has nothing to do with the above, but will retain the above setting on the new drive (DRIVE1).

I hope this helps. The best resource is the HDBDOS User's Manual on Cloud 9's website.
Yeah, I know... Download HDBDOS from here, the manual from there, DW from over there, the DW Wiki is over yonder, and Nitros9 is waaay over there. Bouncing all over the net to get one working package.
It took me 3 months to find everything and get it working. I hadn't subscribed to the list at that time so I had few to ask how it was done.

 

 


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Brant <brant.michael.l at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, May 14, 2015 4:13 pm
Subject: [Coco] Multipak and Drivewire


I have an MPI, I also have a CoCoSDC, along with two FD502s (one stock and
one
with HDB-DOS.)
Both the SDC-DOS and HDB-DOS allow me to use Drivewire (which I
connect to
DW3 on my Mac Pro.)
The question is this how (if possible) does the
system assign disk numbers
and drive numbers?

So far I have used the drive
function but when doing so, I it seems to
cutoff access to the DW and only
access physical disks.

I am fairly new to DW and MPI usage, my old CoCo days
did not have an MPI.

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