HP 4952A Software

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu Jun 3 16:29:47 2004

>
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 10:10:07PM -0600, kenn Jorgensen wrote:
> > The format on disc is LIF, HP's standard floppy disc format
> > back before MSDOS and FAT formatted floppies dominated the
> > world :-) Ordinary 1.44MB IBM formatted 2HD floppies work
> > just fine as target discs.
>
> Is it possible to backup LIF disks with non-HP hardware?

Most definitely (and this gets round any protection on the files on the
HP disks). I routinely archive and copy HP calculator floppy disks (630K
LIF format, from a 9114 drive) on my linux PC. Others have modified the
software to handle the 1.44M-ish LIF disks.

I would assume Teledisk could handle them, but I don't use that program
(in fact I rarely run MS-DOS, and don't have Windows...). The 630K format
is 77 cylinders, 2 sides, 16 sectors/track, 256 bytes/sector

One thing to watch out for is that HP have a bad-block-replacement and
media-use table at the start of cylnder 79 (cylinders 77 and 78 are
totally blank). Normally this doesn't matter -- if you format the disk on
an HP machine it'll write the right stuff there, and then just dump
cylinders 0-76 from the PC. But if either the original or new disk have
bad blocks on them you will have problems. This has never caught me, so I
don't worry about it.

-tony
Received on Thu Jun 03 2004 - 16:29:47 BST