HP storage formats on ss80 protocol disks

Hi Joe, Bill, Tony, Sorry for the delay in replying - the 'proper' job takes precedence unfortunately! Joe - bit of a typo on my part the 9133 appears to be CS/80. Can you explain the differences between CS/80 and SS/80? I seem to remember that CS stands for Command Set and SS stands for Sub Set but other than my lack of knowledge is complete. I have an HP 1000 based system (the 5451c) that runs 7900 and 7906 drives - are these CS/80 based too? It would be useful if I could back the software up on these. I think that the HP ISA card just allowed you to put DOS partitions on HPIB disks not read partitions in other formats. How can I tell if the drive is from an HP 9000 200 or an HP 9000 300 series system? Do you still have your HP LIF foramt description document? - any chance of a copy? Bill - Thanks for clarifying the HP 88500A harware capabilities Tony - thanks for the pointers with the LIF format. I took your byte tables and overlaid them with the data blocks that I am pulling off the disk and they agree very well (all of the record position / record length values seem to be correct). I have a few questions. The volumme label / descriptor block, bytes 16-19, returns a directory length of 1 but when I directory the disk I get around 280 filenames. A directory of one block would only support 32 files - where am I going wrong? In the tracks per surface, Number of surfaces, Records per track fields I get all zeros - does this just mean that the drive does not report them? What is the LIF file structure for text files? Thanks for your replies Cheers Peter Brown _________________________________________________________________ Get Hotmail on your mobile phone http://www.msn.co.uk/mobile