On 2019-01-10 4:43 a.m., Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 10 Jan 2019, Guy Dunphy wrote:
* Also I have some old HP equipment that uses HP-format floppies.
LIF? They're not DOS compatible.
A HP 1630G logic analyzer with 9121 GPIB dual floppy drive, and a HP
80000 data generator. For both machines I have old floppies containing
critical utilities (including a bunch of disassembly utilities for
early processors) that I really want to back up on PC and put online.
Now that is as easy as it can be. There's lif_utils from Tony Duell
(http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/hpil/lif_utils.html), or the HP LIF
Utilities (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?sw=56) for MS-DOS,
of even the LIF tools in HP-UX (e.g. lifls, lifcp).
But those 3½" HP floppies can be read on any standard PC with 3½"
floppy drive, they are in standard MFM format (with some special
feature to mark bad tracks, they put $FF in the sector headers and
continue with the next track). I've written a tool to
read/write/format a diskette in 9122C format to exchange data with our
HP1000.
Christian
One problem you may encounter reading LIF format diskettes on a PC using
these tools is many LIF diskettes are formatted 256 bytes/sector and
there is lots of PC diskette controller out there that cannot deal with
that including all USB diskette drives I am aware of. I use a Panasonic
CF-45 laptop that has a built in diskette drive. HP's LIFUTIL can be
set up to use HPIB storage such as 9122s via a HPIB adapter card.
Paul.
