[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Allen Huffman]

> On Feb 18, 2017, at 8:35 AM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:
> Allen,
> 
> The Ken-Ton RGB hard drive system came with a systom disk. The contents of that disk were:
> BOOT.BAS, DOS-BOOT.BAS, DOSPATCH.BAS, DSK2DSK.BAS, ERRMSG.BIN, ERRMSG.SRC,
> FILECOPY.BAS, FILETYPE.BAS, FINDFILE.BAS, FIX 128.BAS, FIX 128.DO, FMT1.BIN, FMT2.BIN, FMT2.SRC, FORMAT.BAS, FORMAT.SRC, FORMAT+.BAS, FORMAT-N.BAS, MAPOUT.BAS, RAMDISK.BIN, RAMDISK.SRC, RGB-DOS.4N1, RGB-DOS.DIS, RGB-DOS.KEN, RGB-DOS.LRT, RGB-DOS.RGB, SERIES-N.BIN, SERIES-N.SRC, SYSTEM.BAS, TWPATCH.BAS, TWPATCH.BIN, TWPATCH.SRC.
> 
> As you might expect from the names, there are format programs that run under Basic for several types of hard drives. Since there are several source files, you should be able to modify them to fit the specs of your hard drives.
> If you have lost your disk, I can send you an image of this disk.

Thank you, Robert. This is actually what got me asking about the floppy controller working with the KenTon. I looked at my HDB-DOS, and did not find those utilities, but I did find this RGB-DOS image that I had previously managed to transfer to a .DSK image for CoCoSDC.

My problem was that the tools don’t run without RGB-DOS, so I needed a way to boot in to RGB-DOS and load the file from a DSK. I was just going to take the easy way out and boot to SDC-DOS, copy it to a floppy, then boot in to RGB-DOS and run it from the floppy. I finally managed to do that and used HD-UTIL (I think) which gave me the specs of my SyQuest SCSI.

I wondered about the FORMAT utilities but wasn’t sure how to use them. A few of these take inputs similar to what the HD-UTILS output gave me, but I did not get too fare with it.

I needed to identify the bad sectors, anyway, so I did that through B09, writing bad sectors in to a .txt file.

I will revisit these now that I understand what was going on with my MPI slot select. I should be able to use some code from Darren to mount a CoCoSDC drive while running RGB-DOS, so it thinks it is a physical floppy. At least, I think that’s what I did to end up getting all 255+ of my RGB-DOS disk images copied ;-)

		— Allen