AltairClone.com

Hello Wayne,

My mistake, I was copying IDEUTIL to RAM (using AMON) and then trying to run it like that. When I run it from CP/M directly it works fine and I'm able to read data from the disk. I'm wondering how I can copy the data on the disk to RAM and run it from RAM. I don't see an option like that in the IDEUTIL menu. I would like to burn a simple program like that into ROM so that, when the computer is powered on, it executes the ROM program and loads CP/M from disk. I was getting close to having it do that but ran into issues where bytes were being skipped when it was being copied to RAM.

That's excellent! So you can read, write and initialize an IDE disk, right?

Have you made a CP/M 3.0hd boot diskette? You can find it in the "Disk Images" directory of the distribution archive. Use PC2FLOP to transfer the image to a 330Kb diskette.

Beyond that, I think you're also suggesting to make a bootloader ROM that will boot directly from the IDE drives. That would be an excellent contribution!

I have not made such a diskette because I did not want to boot it from a diskette (I'm assuming you meant floppies). I'm more interested in booting CP/M directly from an IDE disk. Based on what you said, that hasn't been done yet, right?

That's right. There's no boot ROM for the Altair that loads from the IDE device. One would need that to initiate the IPL, which could then transfer control to a bootloader track on the IDE media.

That makes sense. Maybe it's something that I will attempt.