[Coco] Making OS-9/NitrOS9 more user friendly Facebook group discussion

[Allen Huffman]

On Nov 17, 2017, at 11:39 AM, Alex Evans <alxevans at concentric.net> wrote:
> 
>   It shouldn't be any different, but it is. I have never had any trouble
>   building boot floppies, even just using the original OS-9 level 2 disks
>   (other than the BLOB), but using anything else as a boot device has
>   proven problematic. This includes, among other things, booting from an
>   80 Meg SCSI drive with 256 byte sectors and booting off CF in the
>   SuperIDE (I am stuck using an older version of NitrOS9).

True. Booting from those devices is not possible without a special DISK BASIC ROM replacement that is able to load the bootfile.

In the Kenton SCSI interface days, I had a floppy boot that would load a bootfile containing the hard disk drivers, then finish the high level boot from the SCSI drive.

Later, I got RGB-DOS and it allowed putting that boot floppy in a virtual hard drive partition so it could load entirely from the drive, but under the hood it was loads from floppy then hard drive.

CoCoSDC is the first device I’ve had that allowed fully booting from a hard drive just using DOS.