[Coco] Help with Nitros9 on SDC?

[Jeff Teunissen]

I'm 99% sure that your problem is caused by the use of the /D0 and /D1
device descriptors.

The CoCoSDC normally emulates a floppy controller, and that works
great for floppy-sized images, but not _totally_ for hard drive sized
ones like the ones we use for NitrOS-9.

Now, the CoCoSDC boot file for NitrOS-9 3.3.0 includes two different
disk drivers to operate the SDC: there's the classic "rb1773" driver,
which old OS-9 called "CC3Disk" and talks to the SDC like it's a
floppy controller (and has devices /D0, /D1, /D2, and /D3), and
there's the "llcocosdc" driver, which talks to the SDC like it's a
hard drive and has devices /SD0 and /SD1.

If you check the number of cylinders, sides, sectors, etc. of the /D0
and /D1 devices, you will probably find that they're set up for
80-track 720K floppy disk drives, or possibly 360K drives, while the
/SD0 and /SD1 devices are set up for disks with thousands of
cylinders.

If you never actually use a real floppy controller, you can safely
remove the rb1773, d0, d1, d2, and d3 modules from your boot file to
save a bit of memory, or leave them in and just stop using them.
Either way, you want to use /SD0 and /SD1 instead.

On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 10:30 PM Don Barber <don at dgb3.net> wrote:
>
> Hi folks, hoping someone here can help me out. I first taught myself
> basic on a coco3 circa 1989 at 9 years old, but lost it later after I
> got out on my own and my parents moved a few times. Since then I've had
> a few decades more of experience, including a CS degree and 25+ years of
> IT and development work, and I've picked up another coco3...and its even
> more fun now that I have a clue whats going on under the covers!
> However, I'm trying to get NitrOS9 going with a new cocosdc, but I'm
> having issues, and hope someone can help point me in the right direction.
>
> I've grabbed the latest 6809 coco3 zip (from 2014) from
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/files/releases/v3.3.0/.
>
> I've extracted nos96809l2v030300coco3_cocosdc.dsk, renamed to nos9.dsk
> and placed it on the sd card.
>
> I start up sdc-dos, and enter:
>
> drive 0,"nos9"
> dos
>
> and nos9 boots, seemingly fine. However, before long if I try to copy
> anything new to the drive, or create any sizable files, I start getting
> error 247 (seek error) and then following that, error 244 (read error).
> The trigger can be as simple as trying to 'dcheck /d1' on another floppy
> image and says:
>
> dcheck: cannot open workfile '/DD/dcheck030'
> ERROR #247
>
> However, when I boot to nos96809l2v030300coco3_40d_1.dsk and
> nos96809l2v030300coco3_40d_2.dsk instead of the !_cocosdc.dsk image,
> everything behaves as expected. When I boot to the !_40d_1.dsk, with the
> !_cocosdc.dsk image mounted on drive 1, I also get error 247 (seek
> error) when accessing /d1, so it seems to be a problem with accessing
> the larger disk image, but not a problem with the 360k floppy images.
> This makes me conclude one of the abstraction layers (nos9, the sdc rom,
> something) isn't handling the larger images correctly....but I'm at a
> bit of a loss on how to debug this further.
>
> I think I covered the basic debugging: 1/ its a good fat32 filesystem;
> ran "mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdb1" on a linux box myself 2/confirmed cocosdc
> is running the latest version (SDC-DOS 1.6) 3/the memory in my coco3 is
> good (used the 512K memtest from Performance Peripherals found on
> colorcomputerarchive.com and let it run for several hours) 4/Confirmed
> the same result using the nos9 nightly build images 5/Tried a different
> sdcard.
>
> In case it helps, dcheck on the 4.5mb nos9 image shows this:
>
> $0900 bytes in allocation map
> 1 sector per cluster
> $004800 total sectors on media
> Sector $00000A is start of root directory FD
> $0013 sectors used for id, allocation map and root directory
> Building allocation map work file...
> dcheck: fatal read error
> ERROR #247
>
> Nothing on the sector math jumps out to me as being wrong, so I think
> nos9 is detecting it fine....does this point to a problem internal to my
> cocoSDC? On Linux I'd be completely at home diving into dmesg and /proc
> to figure this out, but I'm at a bit of a loss here.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on what I'm missing? Should I be mounting the
> larger drive images differently on the cocosdc? Is there a nos9 driver
> I'm missing for accessing larger images on the sdc?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Don
>
>
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