The TRS-80 Journey Continues

[Wayne S]

There’s some utube videos on making bootable floppies. Maybe one of them will give you some ideas.
Here’s one that looks promising.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XoxpnZ__w5Q


Sent from my iPhone

On May 11, 2022, at 07:35, Mike Katz via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

I don't know about TRS-DOS but a lot of early floppy disk format programs had an option to make the formatted disk bootable or not. This would copy the bootloader to the appropriate location on the floppy, copy the OS to the floppy and update any necessary pointers to the OS on the floppy.

Usually a ROM bootloader would load a known sector (usually Track 0, Sector 0) and execute the code from that sector.  That code would then get the address of the Operating System from the disk (either in a fixed location on disk or a fixed location in the directory) and load the OS.

On 5/11/2022 9:18 AM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
<snip>
Based on the results of my last attempt, I doubt it would work.
Looks like there is a need to figure out how to install a boot
block and what files need to be copied to make usable floppies
for all the OSes.  Yet another task to work on.

I still can't believe there is no documented way to do this
already!!

bill


>From what I read, there is no easy way to make a bootable disk from a
hard drive that I know of.  You need to make a backup diskette to
diskette.  Because of this, SuperDisk software and SuperZap utilities
were sold to make these kinds of tasks practical.

https://www.tim-mann.org/trs80/
https://www.tim-mann.org/trs80/Su4cmd.zip

Bill