On 12/5/2016 2:45 PM, Glen Slick wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Holm Tiffe<h...@freibergnet.de> wrote:
I've heard from a friend that another friend that died in the menatime, had
managed to copy HP9121 disks on a plain PC with something like Super Copy.
I tried using ImageDisk on a PC to read the two HP 1630 3.5-inch
floppies I have (10304 8085 preprocessor, 10342 HP-IB, RS-232C/V.24,
RS-449 preprocessor). It appeared to be able to read the expected data
just fine. Singled sided disk with 16 256-byte sectors per track
(sector numbers 0 - 15) and 70 tracks.
But it also seemed to detect a sector number 17 with no data in each
track. Is that a normal 9121 low level format? I haven't tried to
write a floppy back out using ImageDisk to see if the result is
readable on a 9121 drive.
I should also try hooking up a 9121 drive to a PC and see if HPDir
dumps the same binary data I get using ImageDisk.
Here are my notes on LIF disks and the
utils I have. I got this from
somewhere, but can't remember where, so
can't give the well-deserved credit to
the rightful person -- I'm sorry.
There have been different tools provided
for handling LIF discs:
1. Still quite useful are the "LIF
Utilities for DOS" from HP. The LIF
utilities support the handling of LIF
floppy discs in standard PC floppy disc
drives and drives connected via HP-IB
similar to the HPDir program.
A DOS-based graphical user interface
covers functions like initializing LIF
discs, copying files from DOS to LIF and
vice versa, purging files as well as
editing LIF discs with a hex editor.
The LIF Utilities work under DOS and
Windows 9x, but not under NT based
Windows like XP or Vista. The HP-IB
operation is restricted to HP's own
HP-IB interface cards (namely the
HP82335A, the HP82990A and the HP88500A
interfaces) and can communicate only
with drives supporting the CS80/SS80
command sets (not Amigo).
2. Another LIF tool is HP's Standard
Data Format (SDF) Utilities. Although
originally intended for the exchange of
data with HP analyzer instruments, there
are two programs included (LIF.EXE and
LIFDIAG.EXE) for LIF access, file
conversion and diagnostics.
Just like the LIF Utilities those
programs allow initializing LIF discs as
well as file copying, deletion,
conversion and listing both using
standard floppy disc drives and drives
connected via HP-IB.
The SDF utils support SS80 drives
*only* [sic jws] but not AMIGO command
set. However, these programs support the
PCII and AT-GPIB IEEE488/GPIB cards from
National Instruments in addition to the
HP88500A and HP82335 interfaces.
3. Finally, there is still a basic
support for LIF under HP-UX. For a
certain period, the LIF format was used
as bootstrap format (an initial
execution vector was added in the system
record for this purpose).
See HPDir.
