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

[Bill Pierce]

Chris... HDBDOS has NOTHING to do with OS9.
Once OS9 boots ALL RSDOS is lost (including hdbdos)... always has been. OS9 relies on it's own drivers and uses ALL of the 64k (including all rom memory)
Now with that being said, if you are using the Drivewire disks from the repository, you should have access to your normal drives in os9 as those disks come with /d0, /d1, & /d2 installed on the disk.
I think your problem is that you are running hdbdos from another cart & therefore changing the slot number from your disk controller... Personally, I would replace the rom in the disk controller with the hdbdos rom. hdbdos (all forms) is about 98% compatible with RSDOS and will access your drives fine from RSDOS. Read the hdbdos manual:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Support/index.html
But OS9... it has nothing to do with hdbdos (except to boot), and once it's running, you should have drive access.

try:
dir /d0
(with an OS9 disk in the drive)

 

 


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Oliver <chris.w.oliver at me.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sun, Oct 18, 2015 10:28 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] working with physical floppy drives under NitrOS-9 via DriveWire


Apologies — I meant “once NitrOS-9  loads up, I believe it overwrites HDB-DOS…”.
:)

-------
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
-----
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


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