Interest in a DiscFerret?

[Paul Berger]

On 2019-01-10 4:43 a.m., Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2019, Guy Dunphy wrote:
>> * Also I have some old HP equipment that uses HP-format floppies. 
>> LIF? They're not DOS compatible.
>>  A HP 1630G logic analyzer with 9121 GPIB dual floppy drive, and a HP
>>  80000 data generator. For both machines I have old floppies containing
>>  critical utilities (including a bunch of disassembly utilities for
>>  early processors) that I really want to back up on PC and put online.
>
> Now that is as easy as it can be. There's lif_utils from Tony Duell 
> (http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/hpil/lif_utils.html), or the HP LIF 
> Utilities (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?sw=56) for MS-DOS, 
> of even the LIF tools in HP-UX (e.g. lifls, lifcp).
> But those 3½" HP floppies can be read on any standard PC with 3½" 
> floppy drive, they are in standard MFM format (with some special 
> feature to mark bad tracks, they put $FF in the sector headers and 
> continue with the next track). I've written a tool to 
> read/write/format a diskette in 9122C format to exchange data with our 
> HP1000.
>
> Christian

One problem you may encounter reading LIF format diskettes on a PC using 
these tools is many LIF diskettes are formatted 256 bytes/sector and 
there is lots of PC diskette controller out there that cannot deal with 
that including all USB diskette drives I am aware of.  I use a Panasonic 
CF-45 laptop that has a built in diskette drive.  HP's LIFUTIL can be 
set up to use HPIB storage such as 9122s via a HPIB adapter card.

Paul.