H89 disk transfer program

Hi I've started looking at how to make a H89 disk transfer program that would allow one to make images of the hard sectored disk into a DOS file. I've had my H89 powered up and thought I'd pass on one of the first problems I came across ( other than one of the tantalums popping ). The belts on the floppy drives have all stretched. Only about half of my floppies would read. Since I don't have the original full height drive, the drives I do have had no adjustment for belt tension( they were ALPS single sided drives, half height ). I had to file the motor mount holes to get the drives to work well with the pile of disk I have. Anyway, this is something to watch for in the older drives. Now, onto the more useful stuff. I've written some bootstrap code that allows me to pass a program into the H89 from a serial port. The code to do this take a reasonable amount of space because of the need to initialize the serial port. It currently takes about 40H+ of code to enter ( in octal for Heath monitor ). I might find some code in the ROMs that does this part for me. This is a little long but there is not much I can do about it. I am using the LP serial port of the H89 since it runs with a 1:1 wiring of a PC serial port ;) The idea is that the first 4 bytes will contain the address and count to load. The rest will be the actual code. When it finishes the counted bytes, it will automatically switch to the down loaded code. This next code is expected to perform the functions of format, disk image write and disk image read. This will be used as the next level of bootstrapping. I've got notes on all of the entry points to control the H17 disk controller so I can do the various disk operations. There is one problem I have now and that is that the HDOS disk all have a thing called 'Volume Number'. I expect that this was so that one could avoid trashing other disk ( HDOS uses a mount/dismount system ). The difficulty is that the first track is always volume 0 and the others are the particular volume number selected for that disk. In order to read or write, one needs to know the volume number for that disk. This is encoded on the disk, similar to things like sector number and track number. I haven't figured out how HDOS knows what volume the disk is by looking at the first track. I suppose it is someplace there. I suspect that I may want to format the disk as I write the image so that I can pass the volume number along. I'm not sure if it is a good idea or not to keep the original volume number. One might want to have new volume numbers for each disk in their collection. Still, I am making progress. Hopefully, this will make sending and archiving HDOS disk easier. Any suggestions on things I might want to add? Dwight