21 Feb
2008
21 Feb
'08
11:35 a.m.
To Whom It May Concern
I'd like to know the E-Mail-Adress from Bob Maxwell. He wrote an article
in your forum about HP64000-floppys in the year 2004. I need more
Information about these floppys. I have the same problem. I want to get
the information out of 5.1/4"-hp64000-floppys. I'd like to store the files
at a windows95 or windowsXP-computer(or maybe dos). Can you please help
me?
With best regards S?nke Backhaus
(from Germany)
21 Feb
21 Feb
6:52 p.m.
On 21 Feb 2008 at 17:35, Soenke.Backhaus at FH-Augsburg.D wrote:
I want to get the information out of
5.1/4"-hp64000-floppys. I'd like
to store the files at a windows95 or windowsXP-computer(or maybe dos).
I have used Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk program:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/
...to archive HP 64000 diskettes to a PC. The accompanying IMDU program
will generate a binary dump of the diskette image, which can be used with a
(hex) file browser to view the diskette contents.
Connecting the actual 360K floppy from a 64000 system produced more
reliable results than using the 1.2M floppy that was present in the PC.
-- Dave
7:18 p.m.
other useful tools that work well are "rawrite" or rawcopy.
though if you must use dos to read floppies, I always prefer teledisk, however it uses a
proprietary format
teledisk compresses so it makes the images smaller, and it also has handlers for errors,
etc.
if you use linux/bsd, you can simply put the disk in the drive and use dd
like: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/myhome/outputfile.iso
(modify the path as needed)
utilities like rawrite/rawcopy can read the images created by dd so that makes it pretty
handy.
it creates a raw binary dump of the disk in generic format.
Dan.
----------------------------------------
From: jdbryan at acm.org
To: cctech at classiccmp.org
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:52:05 -0500
CC:
Subject: Re: E-Mail-Adress
On 21 Feb 2008 at 17:35, Soenke.Backhaus at FH-Augsburg.D wrote:
_________________________________________________________________
I want to get the information out of
5.1/4"-hp64000-floppys. I'd like
to store the files at a windows95 or windowsXP-computer(or maybe dos).
I have used Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk program:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/
...to archive HP 64000 diskettes to a PC. The accompanying IMDU program
will generate a binary dump of the diskette image, which can be used with a
(hex) file browser to view the diskette contents.
Connecting the actual 360K floppy from a 64000 system produced more
reliable results than using the 1.2M floppy that was present in the PC.
-- Dave
10:07 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On Thursday 21 February 2008 19:18, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
other useful tools that work well are
"rawrite" or rawcopy.
though if you must use dos to read floppies, I always prefer teledisk,
however it uses a proprietary format teledisk compresses so it makes the
images smaller, and it also has handlers for errors, etc.
if you use linux/bsd, you can simply put the disk in the drive and use dd
like: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/myhome/outputfile.iso
(modify the path as needed)
utilities like rawrite/rawcopy can read the images created by dd so that
makes it pretty handy.
it creates a raw binary dump of the disk in generic format.
Dan.
Interesting stuff, I've used rawrite for my first linux installation way back
in 1999, as the system I had to install it to then didn't boot from a
CD. :-)
At this point I have some image files that were apparently created with the
ImageDisk program, and while I can use a file viewer (F3 in mc :-) to see
the innards of the file I'm not sure what the original format was, and am
running into a bit of a problem with non-contiguous files. The images in
question are for the Bigboard II, so it's possible they might even be for an
8" format, and I sure don't have one of those hooked up to any linux box.
Any hints on getting past this to where I can extract the files into something
I can fiddle with would be much appreciated. I'm basically looking at
assembly source, mostly, and would likely want to end up with something on
a 5.25" format. Only suggestion I've gotten so far is to set up a dos box,
which I suppose I could do, but I'd rather avoid that if I can, space here
being a little short at the moment.
From: jdbryan
at acm.org
To: cctech at classiccmp.org
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:52:05 -0500
CC:
Subject: Re: E-Mail-Adress
On 21 Feb 2008 at 17:35, Soenke.Backhaus at FH-Augsburg.D wrote:
_________________________________________________________________ I want to get the information out of
5.1/4"-hp64000-floppys. I'd like
to store the files at a windows95 or windowsXP-computer(or maybe dos).
I have used Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk program:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/
...to archive HP 64000 diskettes to a PC. The accompanying IMDU program
will generate a binary dump of the diskette image, which can be used with
a (hex) file browser to view the diskette contents.
Connecting the actual 360K floppy from a 64000 system produced more
reliable results than using the 1.2M floppy that was present in the PC.
-- Dave 
10:30 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
> other useful tools that work well are
"rawrite" or rawcopy.
> though if you must use dos to read floppies, I always prefer teledisk,
> however it uses a proprietary format teledisk compresses so it makes the
> images smaller, and it also has handlers for errors, etc.
>
> if you use linux/bsd, you can simply put the disk in the drive and use dd
> like: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/myhome/outputfile.iso
> (modify the path as needed)
Interesting stuff, I've used rawrite for my first
linux installation way back
in 1999, as the system I had to install it to then didn't boot from a
CD. :-)
dd, rawread, rawwrite etc. will only work with diskettes which have a format
that the linux driver understands - There are *MANY* variations on the soft-
sector disk format, and programs like ImageDisk and TeleDisk will analyze the
disk to determine how it's formatted, read that format and record metadata
in the image file so that it can be exactly recreated. dd and others will
typically just report an error if an expected sector header is encountered.
At this point I have some image files that were
apparently created with the
ImageDisk program, and while I can use a file viewer (F3 in mc :-) to see
the innards of the file I'm not sure what the original format was, and am
running into a bit of a problem with non-contiguous files. The images in
question are for the Bigboard II, so it's possible they might even be for an
8" format, and I sure don't have one of those hooked up to any linux box.
Any hints on getting past this to where I can extract the files into something
I can fiddle with would be much appreciated. I'm basically looking at
assembly source, mostly, and would likely want to end up with something on
a 5.25" format. Only suggestion I've gotten so far is to set up a dos box,
which I suppose I could do, but I'd rather avoid that if I can, space here
being a little short at the moment.
The disk may have physical and/or logical interleave, which will make sectors
within a track appear to be broken up, as well as file allocation which may
also "break up" the data in a logically contiguous file and spread it around
the disk.
If it has physical interleave, IMDU will show you this in a detail track
listing. The IMDV viewer will also allow you to page through the data and
account for physical interleave (the sectors appear in logically ascending
order). Unfortunately, logical interleave is known only to the CP/M BIOS
which deals with the disk. And file allocation is known to CP/M itself.
I do have a preliminary utility I wrote to extract CP/M files from ImageDisk
CP/M images - Worked very well for me in extracting some CDOS files, however
I didn't get much interest in it so I never bothered to expand it into a
general purpose utility - it is configurable however - I can make it available
if you want to play with it. You will need to figure out the right parameters
for Bigboard disks (the tables for Chucks 22disk might be helpful).
Regards,
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
10:55 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On 21 Feb 2008 at 22:30, Dave Dunfield wrote:
I do have a preliminary utility I wrote to extract
CP/M files from ImageDisk
CP/M images - Worked very well for me in extracting some CDOS files, however
I didn't get much interest in it so I never bothered to expand it into a
general purpose utility - it is configurable however - I can make it available
if you want to play with it. You will need to figure out the right parameters
for Bigboard disks (the tables for Chucks 22disk might be helpful).
I do have a version of ctod that works from "straight" image files of
floppies (i.e., the sectors appear in consecutive order (no physical
interleave) and in side-to-side ordering. It works for my purposes
(mostly reading images formed from Catweasel maps), but might not
with all formats.
The world of CP/M diskettes is far more complex than simple 22Disk
can manage. There's a special version that I sell where we have to
program the sector mapping algorithm--there are formats that employ
logical cylinder- and side-skewing as well as starting at a central
cylinder and working outwards using alternate traks on either side of
the directory. One or two formats use differently-sized sectors on
each track. This isn't even counting the differing recording
methods, such as GCR or zoned sector packing.
The imagination of CP/M CBIOS authors never ceases to surprise me.
Cheers,
Chuck
11:18 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On Thursday 21 February 2008 22:55, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 21 Feb 2008 at 22:30, Dave Dunfield wrote:
Isn't that what the 1541 did?
I do have a preliminary utility I wrote to
extract CP/M files from
ImageDisk CP/M images - Worked very well for me in extracting some CDOS
files, however I didn't get much interest in it so I never bothered to
expand it into a general purpose utility - it is configurable however - I
can make it available if you want to play with it. You will need to
figure out the right parameters for Bigboard disks (the tables for Chucks
22disk might be helpful).
I do have a version of ctod that works from "straight" image files of
floppies (i.e., the sectors appear in consecutive order (no physical
interleave) and in side-to-side ordering. It works for my purposes
(mostly reading images formed from Catweasel maps), but might not
with all formats.
The world of CP/M diskettes is far more complex than simple 22Disk
can manage. There's a special version that I sell where we have to
program the sector mapping algorithm--there are formats that employ
logical cylinder- and side-skewing as well as starting at a central
cylinder and working outwards using alternate traks on either side of
the directory. One or two formats use differently-sized sectors on
each track.
And it also ran a different number of sectors, though as far as I know they
were all the same size.
This isn't even counting the differing recording
methods, such as GCR or
zoned sector packing.
The imagination of CP/M CBIOS authors never ceases to surprise me.
Yes, it's really something, and I remember programs like Media Master and
Uniform to try and deal with it, and being limited in terms of what I could
do to read that stuff since my primary (and for a long while my _only_) CP/M
box was equipped with single-sided drives. :-)
What I'm probably going to have to do at some point is decide on a format I
want to use with that BBII. The time I put it together there seemed to be an
assumption that one would be using 8" drives, I think that's what they gave
you the BIOS and their version of CP/M on, but I'd put it in a box with a
couple of 5.25" drives. These days I think perhaps 3.5" HD floppies might be
a better choice since I have so darn many of them (both disks and drives) on
hand here. You can't even find 5.25" drives that easily any more, never
mind 8", and I haven't looked for the media for them for ages.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
11:33 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On 21 Feb 2008 at 23:18, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
What I'm probably going to have to do at some
point is decide on a format I
want to use with that BBII. The time I put it together there seemed to be an
assumption that one would be using 8" drives, I think that's what they gave
you the BIOS and their version of CP/M on, but I'd put it in a box with a
couple of 5.25" drives. These days I think perhaps 3.5" HD floppies might be
a better choice since I have so darn many of them (both disks and drives) on
hand here. You can't even find 5.25" drives that easily any more, never
mind 8", and I haven't looked for the media for them for ages.
Why not run your 3.5" drives at 360 RPM? Then the HD format
corresponds exactly to 8" drives.
Cheers,
Chuck
11:57 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On Thursday 21 February 2008 23:33, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 21 Feb 2008 at 23:18, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I see no reason why not. I haven't gotten so far as looking at any sort of
technical aspects of it yet, though, having only just started to consider
the idea...
It's been some time since I looked at the hardware aspects of drive
interfacing in detail, but I recall one switch on the BBII that had to be
set to select which type of drive, and some jumpers as well, I'll have to
look into just what they fiddle with.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
What I'm probably going to have to do at some
point is decide on a format
I want to use with that BBII. The time I put it together there seemed to
be an assumption that one would be using 8" drives, I think that's what
they gave you the BIOS and their version of CP/M on, but I'd put it in a
box with a couple of 5.25" drives. These days I think perhaps 3.5" HD
floppies might be a better choice since I have so darn many of them (both
disks and drives) on hand here. You can't even find 5.25" drives that
easily any more, never mind 8", and I haven't looked for the media for
them for ages.
Why not run your 3.5" drives at 360 RPM? Then the HD format
corresponds exactly to 8" drives. 
25 Feb
25 Feb
2:18 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On Feb 21, 2008, at 11:33 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Are many 3.5" drives able to be set up for 360RPM?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
What I'm
probably going to have to do at some point is decide on a
format I
want to use with that BBII. The time I put it together there
seemed to be an
assumption that one would be using 8" drives, I think that's what
they gave
you the BIOS and their version of CP/M on, but I'd put it in a
box with a
couple of 5.25" drives. These days I think perhaps 3.5" HD
floppies might be
a better choice since I have so darn many of them (both disks and
drives) on
hand here. You can't even find 5.25" drives that easily any
more, never
mind 8", and I haven't looked for the media for them for ages.
Why not run your 3.5" drives at 360 RPM? Then the HD format
corresponds exactly to 8" drives.
3:31 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On 25 Feb 2008 at 14:18, Dave McGuire wrote:
Many Japanese drives are, such as many Teac FD-235HF models, even if
it's not documented as such. Many manufacturers use the same motor
drive subasssembly for normal and "3-mode" drives.
Cheers,
Chuck
Why not run
your 3.5" drives at 360 RPM? Then the HD format
corresponds exactly to 8" drives.
Are many 3.5" drives able to be set up for 360RPM?
21 Feb
21 Feb
11:03 p.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
On Thursday 21 February 2008 22:30, Dave Dunfield wrote:
dd, rawread, rawwrite etc. will only work with diskettes which have a
format that the linux driver understands - There are *MANY* variations on
the soft- sector disk format, and programs like ImageDisk and TeleDisk will
analyze the disk to determine how it's formatted, read that format and
record metadata in the image file so that it can be exactly recreated. dd
and others will typically just report an error if an expected sector header
is encountered.
Hmm.
Having dealt with that sort of stuff in the distant past <g>, some of it
should have occurred to me. The "iso" mentioned in an earlier post suggests
that I might be able to mount the image, though as you point out something's
going to have to interpret the stuff that it finds. I did download some
tools for dealing with cp/m formats, supposed to work similar to mtools,
but haven't installed them yet and at the moment that stuff's on a drive
that's giving me some trouble and which isn't currently mounted. Maybe a bit
more of a look than I've given that would be worth my while, since I'd held
off on installing it thinking that a box with a 5.25" drive was probably a
good part of the plan, never thought about using it on image files...
Sector skew is something I hadn't even thought of at all, in this
context. :-) And as for the allocation interleave, I'm pretty sure that's
at least a part of what's going on. It's been a really long time (maybe 20
years?) since I did some rebuilding of a CP/M filesystem but a glance at the
allocation map in there pretty well confirms this, I remember at least that
much.
other useful tools that work well are
"rawrite" or rawcopy.
though if you must use dos to read floppies, I always prefer teledisk,
however it uses a proprietary format teledisk compresses so it makes
the images smaller, and it also has handlers for errors, etc.
if you use linux/bsd, you can simply put the disk in the drive and use
dd like: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/myhome/outputfile.iso
(modify the path as needed)
Interesting stuff, I've used rawrite for my first linux installation way
back in 1999, as the system I had to install it to then didn't boot from
a CD. :-) At this point
I have some image files that were apparently created with
the ImageDisk program, and while I can use a file viewer (F3 in mc :-)
to see the innards of the file I'm not sure what the original format was,
and am running into a bit of a problem with non-contiguous files. The
images in question are for the Bigboard II, so it's possible they might
even be for an 8" format, and I sure don't have one of those hooked up
to any linux box.
Any hints on getting past this to where I can extract the files into
something I can fiddle with would be much appreciated. I'm basically
looking at assembly source, mostly, and would likely want to end up
with something on a 5.25" format. Only suggestion I've gotten so far is
to set up a dos box, which I suppose I could do, but I'd rather avoid
that if I can, space here being a little short at the moment.
The disk may have physical and/or logical interleave, which will make
sectors within a track appear to be broken up, as well as file allocation
which may also "break up" the data in a logically contiguous file and
spread it around the disk. If it has physical interleave, IMDU will show you this
in a detail track
listing. The IMDV viewer will also allow you to page through the data and
account for physical interleave (the sectors appear in logically ascending
order). Unfortunately, logical interleave is known only to the CP/M BIOS
which deals with the disk. And file allocation is known to CP/M itself.
The problem in terms of BIOS is that I don't know what BIOS was used to create
the image files in the first place -- that's a large part of what's on the
image tha tI'm trying to recover. :-) Sort of one of those chicken-and-egg
situations, I guess.
I do have a preliminary utility I wrote to extract
CP/M files from
ImageDisk CP/M images - Worked very well for me in extracting some CDOS
files, however I didn't get much interest in it so I never bothered to
expand it into a general purpose utility - it is configurable however - I
can make it available if you want to play with it. You will need to figure
out the right parameters for Bigboard disks (the tables for Chucks 22disk
might be helpful).
Sure. I think I may have a copy of 22disk around here (looking...) Yup.
Which tables are you talking about here? There's a file "CPM-TYPE.LST" in
there but it only lists 2 variations on "Bigboard", SS and DS 8", both
being 512 bytes/sector. I have no idea if this also holds true for the BBII.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
22 Feb
22 Feb
9:40 a.m.
New subject: Floppies was Re: E-Mail-Adress
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Interesting stuff, I've used rawrite for my first
linux installation way back
in 1999, as the system I had to install it to then didn't boot from a
CD. :-)
Drifting a little, but does anyone know when rawrite first appeared? I first
installed Linux in 1993, but I really don't remember what I used to make the
actual floppies. I was definitely running MSODS* (and Windows 3.xx) around
then, so it had to be something that ran under plain ol' DOS.
* I kind of liked that as a typo, so I left it as-is :-)
cheers
Jules
5969
days inactive
5973
days old
12 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
cclist＠sydex.com -
dave06a＠dunfield.com -
dgahling＠hotmail.com -
jdbryan＠acm.org -
jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
rtellason＠verizon.net -
Soenke.Backhaus＠FH-Augsburg.DE