17 Apr
2003
17 Apr
'03
5:41 a.m.
Peter,
At 12:52 PM 4/17/03 +0000, you wrote:
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.
I doubt it. The 9133/9134 A, B, D and H are all SS-80. That's why I asked which
model you had. SS-80 in a hard drive is unusually.
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 don't know the details except that SS-80 is supposed to be a sub-set of the CS-80
protocall. I had a manual with the instruction set for CS-80 but I gave it to Steve
Robertson for their use in writing a CS-80 driver for HIPLOS for the HP 1000s. I do still
have a document titled "HP Flexible Disk Drive Command Set" that describes what
I assume to be SS-80 altough it doesn't specificly say so. I've never seen the
docs for Amigo protocall but I think that a couple of list members have them. Frank
McConnel comes to mind.
I have an HP 1000 based system (the 5451c)
I've been meaning to E-mail you and find out more about your HP 1000. Can you give
me more details about it? BTW yesterday I just found another one buried in storage that
I'd forgotten about. It's a M series. I also picked up the cable that you wanted.
I can ship it with the manual. More on that by direct E-mail.
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 don't have any info on the 7900 so I can't tell you anything about it. But
the 7906 is an Amigo/MAC interface. I don't know if the Amigo portion is the same as
that used for the older floppy disk drives but I assume that it is or that it's at
least close. I'm not sure what all is required to support SS-80/CS-80 on the HP 1000s
but it definitely needs more than the Amigo/MAC inteface.
I think that the HP ISA card just allowed you to put DOS partitions on HPIB
disks not read partitions in other formats.
I knew it put MS_DOS format on the drive but I thought that it might have some lower
level commands that would let you write a driver to read HP formats. What you describe,
MS-DOS format - no HP format support, is the same as what the HP 110 Portable and Portable
Plus do with the HP 9114 disk drive.
How can I tell if the drive is from an HP 9000 200 or an HP 9000 300 series
system?
Unless you just happen to know where it came from, the only what that I know of is to
connect it to a 9000 200/300 and boot it and do a CAT. I thought that you might know the
history of the drive.
Do you still have your HP LIF foramt description document? - any
chance of a copy?
I don't think I have it any more. I gave it to someone that was researching the
LIF formats and trying to come up with a way to use the HP LIFUTILS in a predictable
manner.
Joe
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
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