Interfacing an HP 9134 HDD to my HP 85

Hi Bob & Joe, At 04/15/03 12:01 PM Joe wrote ... The 9134A will work just fine with a HP85. It's the same as a 9135A without the 5.25" floppy drive that the 9135A has. I've used a 9135A with both the HP85/87 family machines and with a HP9835B. I believe those commands are for a 9826 or something else. On the HP85, the 9134A/9135A drives emulate four 9895 8" floppy drives (approximately 1.2 Mbytes each). If the unit address switches are set for 0, the individual logical drive units are ":D700", ":D701", "D702", and "D703" on the HP85. I had much the same trouble with the hard drive in my 9135A when I got it. It appears that the drive mechanism got "sticky" during a long period of storage. Much of the other stuff I got from the same lot as the 9135A was rusty. Anyhow, with some encouragement from list member Vassilis, I opened up the case, unscrewed the hard drive (I think it's an ST-506) from the mounting hardware and set it on it's side, still hooked up, and was able to eventually get the disk to initialize. It took a number of tries before I could get all four partitions to initialize, but once I got them all going, it worked fine. I would try MASS STORAGE IS ":D700" and then INITIALIZE. If that doesn't work, then try the same thing with ":D701", then ":D702", then ":D703". I wouldn't give up unless you've tried it multiple times, alternating between partitions. If you do decide to open up the case, you can see an arm on the side of the drive that is supposed to move - it moves about 90 degrees going from the :D700 partition to the :D701 partition. Once I got it working on the HP85 I tried it using my 9835B with Mass Storage ROM, but I had to re-initialize the partitions I wanted to use with the 9835B because they weren't compatible with the HP85 (too bad, I'd hoped to be able to transfer data that way). Right now I have two partitions in HP85 format and two in 9835 format. At least Bob got the hard drive in his 9134A. I bought a second one that was listed on eBay that ended later the same day as his, and when it arrived I found that the unit had been stripped and there was no hard drive inside :-( Anybody have a spare ST-506??? Hope this helps, Alex The Calculator Museum Web Page http://www.calcmuseum.com