HP9826 Question - Basic 5.12 and such

From: Scott Stevens <sastevens_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Wed Mar 31 17:25:37 2004

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:53:34 -0500
"Joe R." <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com> wrote:

> At 08:14 PM 3/30/04 -0500, you wrote:
> >Hello all,
> >
> >I have a question or 2 to ask on the HP9826. I am now the proud owner of
> >the labs old system.
> >Now I have several issues to resolve. The first is the reason I have and
> >the lab does not. The
> >display is out of focus and not too bright. I have tried to adjust using
> >the pots inside labeled focus
> >brightness. It helped alittle but not much. Any ideas?
> >
> >Also its no fun without an OS. Now we have BASIC Ver 5.12 at the
> >lab. Unfortunately its on
> >3 1/2 inch diskettes and the HP9826 has a 5 1/4 diskette drive. Hence
> >short of using a mallet
> >that won't help. So is there a method of using a PC to make 5 1/4s for it
> >since I do have the
> >3 1/2s?
>
> It's POSSIBLE to transfer data that way but it probably won't work in
> this case since the 3 1/2" hold a lot more data and the 5 1/4" needs to be
> bootable. Can you borrow your labs 3 1/2" drive or borrow one from someone
> else? Are your 3 1/2"s single or double sided? Where are you located?
>
A number of years ago I successfully 'shoehorned' in a 3-1/2" floppy drive on an Intel PDS system. The Intel box only had 5-1/4" 'quad density' 80-track drives, for which media was difficult and expensive to obtain. The trick I used was to plug in a 720K 3-1/2" drive as the second drive on the floppy cable. The system thought of it as being the same drive as a 5-1/4" 720K (quad density) drive and let me perform 'disk copy' routines from 5-1/4" to 3-1/2" media. Then I installed the 3-1/2" drive in the box and used it as the primary boot drive for ISIS. It worked really well, considering I only had the few Original Intel diskettes to convert in this fashion.

Nowadays, of course, 3-1/2" 720K diskettes are almost as hard to obtain in any quantity as 5-1/4" 720K diskettes were back then.

This might not work for what's being discussed here, but it worked really well for me at the time and is a method that should also be considered. 'Just plug it in and try' is sometimes worth attempting.

-Scott
Received on Wed Mar 31 2004 - 17:25:37 BST