[Coco] Help with Nitros9 on SDC?

[L. Curtis Boyle]

If you want to give it a shot, you can also try EOU 6.0.1, which has hybrid image so that you can boot to the hard drive by typing DOS on the VHD image. Floppy drives are also preinstalled, so it may work easier for you. 

http://lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/nitros9.html

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 9, 2021, at 8:30 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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