[Coco] Drivewire issues

[Barry Nelson]

Once I gather all the background information, it is my intention to provide step by step instructions and links to the needed files to boot your CoCo from DriveWire. I now know that you have a CoCo 3 with 512k and a Super IDE pak. I still do not know if you have a 6809 or 6309 CPU, and so I can not recommend a specific NitrOS9 3.3.0 image for you yet. I can tell you you most likely have the wrong version of HDBDOS in rom to boot directly from DriveWire, the version that came with your Super IDE controller is setup so your DOS command will boot NitrOS9 from that controller, you need a rom that will boot from DriveWire to get started. There are two option, HDBDOS for DriveWire (recommended) or a DriveWire NitrOS9 boot rom. To load that rom there are a few choices. You can connect your Super IDE storage to a PC running VCC and copy a disk image to it (complex, but fast) or you can load a wav file of the rom into your PC and play it to the cassette port in your CoCo (simpler if you have a Cassette cable, but slow). If you load the HDBDOS rom from cassette, you could then use DriveWire to mount a disk image with a copy of the rom that you could install into the Super IDE flash memory. I want to establish which options you want so I can provide a link to exactly the files you need.

> Theodore (Alex) Evans alxevans at concentric.net 
> Sun Nov 22 23:30:21 EST 2015
> 
> Once again, thank you all for trying to help.
> 
> The biggest part of the problem was that you can't format a zero size 
> image from NitrOS9 and once you create a image of the appropriate size, 
> you have to do a physical as well as logical format on it.
> 
> Incidentally, if someone is having trouble getting Drivewire to work, 
> telling them to boot their machine using Drivewire is not a constructive 
> suggestion.