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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Received on Thu Apr 17 2003 - 12:41:01 BST