[Coco] working with physical floppy drives under NitrOS-9 via DriveWire

[Chris Oliver]

All — To clarify my use case:
I want to be able to boot to NitrOS-9 and run it from DriveWire — while using my two physical floppy drives.  (Basically running the OS from a virtual drive, while physically accessing the floppy drives tied to my 3029 controller.)
Problem I’m having is chicken/egg I think.  Currently I need to load HDB-DOS in order to DOS the NitrOS-9 image on DriveWire.  Once DriveWire loads up, I believe it overwrites HDB-DOS (doesn’t it?).  And then I need a path to the physical floppies — meaning I then have to switch over to slot 4 on the MPI (where the controller lives).  After that switch to slot 4, doing things like directory listings and format commands (from NitrOS-9 via DriveWire to my physical /d0 drive) does cause the drive to spin up, and the read/seek head does attempt to do something (makes some very different sounds than normal, though) — but all such commands end in error codes.  A format of /d0, for example, gets to the stage of naming the disk before it dumps out with an error. Dir commands result in errors without even partial listings.
So the real question is: Does NitrOS-9 — running via DriveWire (not via a physical boot disk) - have the ability to access the physical floppy drives via the 3029 controller.  And if so, how can you boot to the OS on DriveWire (which seems to require HDB-DOS), while at the same time providing access to the controller (which is tied to slot 4 in the MPI).  And in a scheme like this — which elements remain resident (vs. being overwritten by others)?  
Hope this helps explain it better — I’m probably missing something obvious here.  :)
Thanks to all!
Chris
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All,

I leverage HDB-DOS (burned onto an eprom in slot 1 of the MPI) to DOS to the latest Coco1 NitrOS-9 disk image (that has been loaded into the Disk 0 slot in DriveWire).  Loads up great.  Can work with virtual drives (/X1, etc.) perfectly fine.

So — now I want to be able to access the physical floppies.  I have the orig 3029 Tandy controller, with a pair of the orig Tandy floppy drives.  Is there any way to run NitrOS-9 via DriveWire, and yet be able format and use physical floppies?  Would be great if I wasn’t restricted to virtual drives…

Very curious — let me know!

Chris