First, i needed to work out what version of Cromix to install. The Cromemco repository is well stocked although i did find that some images were better than others.
Rather than using 8″ drives straight up, i started with HD 5.25″ drives. This post describes how this is done. My intention was to eventually use 8″ drives, but the Cromemco 8″ drive interface is a little special so i saved that hurdle for another day.
The version of RDOS in the boot ROM only supports 40 track drives so i was restricted to a 360k drive as the first drive, but this could be a gotek/flashfloppy. Actually, this is a real advantage because once past RDOS the gotek can just morph into a pseudo 8″ drive after boot. It might be possible to pull that trick off with a HD drive too – a thought for another day.
I made a generic drive unit a while back with two goteks and two 40 track drives and lots of configuration options (a post for another time perhaps). I used it a jukebox for disk images.
As i had no hard drive option available, i was restricted to installing a very basic system on to two 1.2MB floppy disks and then using a third to swap programs in and out. Very limited, but enough to show it working and perhaps enough to inspire looking for a hard drive solution.
I started with early versions of Cromix in the hope that they would be smaller – and generally they are. I also needed systems that would install from a 40 track drive.
I found some success with version 20.09, but the system was very erratic. There was one last RAM error that was the cause and then i was able to complete the installation successfully following the detailed instructions in the Cromix Administration Manual from the GIT repository.
I found that not all high density drives wre suitable, but never really put my finger on why; i was just happy to find two that would do the job. It seemed important to always have the drives spinning, otherwise i got errors. This also proved to be the case when i moved to 8″ drives. There seems to have been some expectation that the drives would always spin, and the head would be engaged only when the drive was being used.