HP storage formats on ss80 protocol disks

Peter, Are you dealing with SS80 or CS80? The title says SS-80 but the text says CS-80. Which model 9133 are you using? Do you know what kind of system it was previously used on? Bob Shannon, Steve Robertson and a couple of others have done a LOT of work figuring out the CS-80 protocall so that they can write drivers for use with the HP 1000. Apparently there's a lot more to it than what's shown in the instruction manual. FYI at one time HP made a kit that had a 8 bit ISA HP-IB card along with software and docs to let you use one of the HP drives on a PC. I used to have one but don't remember the exact name or model. I don't know if it was capable of reading HP data from a drive or not but it's a possibility. If the drive came from a 9000 200 computer, it could be LIF or HFS. HP used both. To make matter worse there are a LOT of different LIF formats. I used to have a document from HP that described some of the different LIF formats that were used just on their instruments and there were about two dozen different formats as I recall. And that did not include the formats used on the various computers! Joe At 09:23 PM 4/15/03 +0000, you wrote: >Hi folks, > >I have an HP 9133 HDD that I'm going to have to re-format (for an HP based >measuring system). > >The drive already has quite a lot of software on it that it seems a shame to >destroy. > >I've stuck a bus analyser on the drive and had a quick look at the data >passing back and forth between a controller and it. I think that I can >control the drive OK (using cs80 protocol) from a PC with HPIB controller >card - i.e. I can identify the drive, check block sizes and pull data off or >write data to the drive. > >It strikes me that an application that enables the information on a cs/80 >drive to be pulled onto a PC, backed-up on another format (e.g. CD ROM) and >then written back to the cs80 drive would be useful - does such an >application already exist? > > >It looks as though the first block on the disk (block 0) contains >information about the volume label, number of blocks available, number of >blocks allocated etc. (and I assume the length of the catalog). > >The next few blocks seem to contain the catalog information itself - file >names, start locations lengths, file types etc. > >Does anyone have access to details of the format that HP use to store files >on cs80 protocol disks/tapes? > >(I already have a document 'cs/80 instruction set' dated March 1983 that has >proved invaluable in understanding the messages between the controller and >disk drive.) > >Any help much appreciated. > >Cheers > >Peter Brown > >_________________________________________________________________ >Stay in touch with absent friends - get MSN Messenger >http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger