OS-9 login / shutdown

[Jules Richardson]

OS-9 Al wrote:
> 
>> I've just come across my first OS9 system
>
> Power off at will! 

Great :)  I've since found that the floppy drive in the system was hosed, but 
the boot floppy's still good, so I've now managed to boot from floppy only, 
which is a start.

Unfortunately accesses to the hard disk are currently failing; my assumption 
is that the board used to store hard disk geometry in NVRAM and the NVRAM 
battery's likely long since given up. At this moment I have no idea how to 
reprogram it as that was almost certainly done with a utility outside of the 
OS-9 boot floppy that I have...  (remember that this system uses an ST506 disk 
via a bridge board, so it's non-intelligent and needs its drive geometry 
stored somewhere)

Still, it is at the stage of being an operational OS-9 system now - I just 
don't know what's lurking on that hard disk. Hopefully it was all non-exciting 
user data...


>> On the plus side, the interface between host and disk unit is SASI, so 
>> there's
>> a chance I can do a raw backup of the drive via a modern system. On 
>> the minus
>> side, the physical drive is an ST506 type via an OMTI bridge board, so 
>> I can't
>> easily go from raw backup to working system without proper low-level 
>> format
>> utils (which I don't have, although I'm still sorting through floppies 
>> that
>> came in the same haul)
> 
> You can do a web search and find disk utilities for PC and maybe Linux 
> (and maybe Mac) that will read/write to an OS-9 disk image.

Ah, thanks - that's worth bearing in mind if it turns out that I have no way 
of getting the machine's hard drive working with the system itself; it'd be 
nice to see what's on there at least.


cheers!

Jules