Help with embedded OS9 install

[Rolkin]

Sorry for the long read on a first post.

Current Floppy drives used on my equipment: Sony MPF920, Panasonic JU-257A727P.
I have been successful with a newer Dell replacement drive but we are having reliability issues with the floppy disks and are trying to replace them.

I bought an HxC 2001 Ver F and loaded it with the PC compatible 1.44MB CFG file and disks.

When I started it up I received OS9 error 247: SEEK ERROR - physical seek to non-existant sector. That's when I noticed that the floppy cable was twisted not straight through. So I changed from ID0A to ID03 (dip switch 4). This seems to fix the hardware issue but now the disk cannot be read.
OS9 Error 244: READ ERROR - Data transfer error during disk read operation, or SCF (terminal) input buffer overrun.

To try and bypass this I tried making a new disk using the HxC emulator software but it doesn't have the correct drive parameters to read the physical disk.

So I have a few questions about this:

1) is there a program that can read the disk parameters of a current "good" physical disk so I can create a blank copy and put it on the drive?
ie Tracks, Sectors, Sector start, Sector size, number of sides, interleave, etc...

2) Will CoCo, Dragon, or TRS-80 settings work for a system I assume is based on OS-9000 (OS9/68000)? Shell line is locked out by manufacturer so I can't check version. Tool was originally made pre-OS9 but was later upgraded in the 80's up through 2010, so it could possibly be any version of OS9 but the dual thread capability makes me think it's OS-9000 or at least OS-9/68000.

3)Without knowing the disk parameters, could I install this into the tool and tell it to format the HxC emulated disk000? Would that work? Because that seems the easiest way to make a good disk I could copy as many time as i needed. This is how we format replacement disks currently. I backed out on performing this last time because it lists the floppy controller as /hd0 which should be the main drive. I believe OS9 mounts the FDC as /fd0 and /fd1 for drives A:/B: until I'm certain, I'm going to avoid formatting the drive and taking the equipment down hard. It's possible that it didn't mount the floppy drive correctly but I will be testing today to see how the normal floppy drives are mounted by the system.

So, after that long post your experience and questions are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[Rolkin]

Small update. I forgot that OS9 loads itself into RAM. So saves to and from the hard-drive appear to read and write to RAM. The save files we keep on the Floppy drive are saved to /d0_hd which is why I was thinking I had the wrong address. The normal Floppy drive reads and writes from this address so the HxC was installed correctly.

I'm confident on the hardware side I just need to figure out how to format the disk so it can be read. I will like to move forward with the formatting attempt but I'm not sure if HxC will allow the software created floppy "disk" to be formatted. Any instructions if possible on creating a disk using the host format disk option?

**Edit** Also I did find out that OS-9 uses 256 byte sectors. Also from "http://www.icdia.co.uk/microware/tech/tech_7.pdf"

"To eliminate hardware dependencies, OS-9 uses a logical sector number (LSN) to identify each sector without regard to track and surface numbering. It is the responsibility of the disk driver module or the disk controller to map logical sector numbers to track/surface/sector addresses. OS-9’s file system uses LSNs from 0 to (n-1), where “n” is the total number of sectors on the drive. "

So it should start at Sector 0 Track 0 is my guess. I'll post more as I find it, hopefully this will be useful to someone else also.

[Jeff]

Format should works with the HxC as long as the hfe image has the same density and bitrate.

[Rolkin]

System format on a Standard 3.5" HD Floppy image worked.

Thanks for the help.