Subject: RE: HP storage formats on ss80 protocol disks

From: "Peter Brown" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Apr 15 16:26:14 2003

Hi folks,

I have an HP 9133 HDD that I'm going to have to re-format (for an HP based 
measuring system).

The drive already has quite a lot of software on it that it seems a shame to 
destroy.

I've stuck a bus analyser on the drive and had a quick look at the data 
passing back and forth between a controller and it.  I think that I can 
control the drive OK (using cs80 protocol) from a PC with HPIB controller 
card - i.e. I can identify the drive, check block sizes and pull data off or 
write data to the drive.

It strikes me that an application that enables the information on a cs/80 
drive to be pulled onto a PC, backed-up on another format (e.g. CD ROM) and 
then written back to the cs80 drive would be useful - does such an 
application already exist?

With the data clocks off the drive, I'm having a few problems working out 
the actual format that HP use to record files on the disk.

It looks as though the first block on the disk (block 0) contains 
information about the volume label, number of blocks available, number of 
blocks allocated etc. (and I assume the length of the catalog).

The next few blocks seem to contain the catalog information itself - file 
names, start locations lengths, file types etc.

Does anyone have access to details of the format that HP use to store files 
on cs80 protocol disks/tapes?

(I already have a document 'cs/80 instruction set' dated March 1983 that has 
proved invaluable in understanding the messages between the controller and 
disk drive.)

Any help much appreciated.

Cheers

Peter Brown

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From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Apr 15 19:38:14 2003

Peter,

   Are you dealing with SS80 or CS80? The title says SS-80 but the text says CS-80.

   Which model 9133 are you using? Do you know what kind of system it was previously used on?

   Bob Shannon, Steve Robertson and a couple of others have done a LOT of work figuring out the CS-80 protocall so that they can write drivers for use with the HP 1000. Apparently there's a lot more to it than what's shown in the instruction manual.

   FYI at one time HP made a kit that had a 8 bit ISA HP-IB card along with software and docs to let you use one of the HP drives on a PC. I used to have one but don't remember the exact name or model. I don't know if it was capable of reading HP data from a drive or not but it's a possibility.

>the actual format that HP use to record files on the disk.

   If the drive came from a 9000 200 computer, it could be LIF or HFS. HP used both. To make matter worse there are a LOT of different LIF formats. I used to have a document from HP that described some of the different LIF formats that were used just on their instruments and there were about two dozen different formats as I recall. And that did not include the formats used on the various computers!

    Joe

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From: [email-masked] (Tony Duell)
Date: Tue Apr 15 21:37:18 2003

> on cs80 protocol disks/tapes?

THis sounds very much like LIF (Logical Interchange Format). It's 
documented (mostly) in the back of the manual for the HP71 HPIL module 
(of all places). All blocks are 256 bytes long.

Block 0 is the volume label/descriptor block
Bytes 
0-1  LIF ID (0x80, 0)
2-7  Volume lablel, ASCII, padded with spaces
8-11 Directory start block number, MSB first
12-13 System 3000 compatibility (0x10, 0)
14-15 zeros
16-19 Directory length (in blocks, MSB first)
20-21 Version (normally 0 1)
22-23 zeros
24-27 Tracks per surface
28-31 Number of surfaces
32-35 Records per track
36-41 Date and Time intialised (year, month, day, hour, minute, second in BCD)
42-255 zeros

Block 1 is all zeros

Each directoy block (the directory normally starts in block 2, BTW) 
contains 8 directory entries, each 32 bytes long. Each entry describes a 
file. Files must be contiguous, and the directory entries must appear in 
the 'right order' -- that's to say they describe the files (and unused 
space) in the order it appears on the disk. 

A directory entry contains ;
Bytes
0-9 Filename, ASCII padded with spaces
10-11 Filetype (binary)
12-15 File starting block, MSB first
16-19 File length in blocks, MSB first
20-25 Date and Time created (see above for format)
26-27 Volume flag/number (0x80 1)
28-31 File type specific bytes (often the exact file length, record size, 
      protection, etc is put here. File lengths may not be in bytes!)

The filetype is a 16 bit number. The important ones to recognise are 
0 0         Deleted file (empty space on the disk)
0xFF 0xFF   End of directory 
0 1         Text file (note, this is a somewhat odd format, it's not a 
            simple stream of ASCII characters).
Others will be OS-specific. I know them for the calculators, but that's 
no help to you.

You may want to look at my 'LIF utilites for Linux', available from the 
HPCC web site. Although they won't do what you want (they're written for 
the 9114 floppy disks used on the calculators, and the parameters of this 
disk type are hard-coded in some of the programs), you might get some 
useful hints from the source code, or you might just want to laugh at my 
terrible C. 

-tony

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From: Bill McDermith <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Apr 15 21:38:37 2003

>Peter,
...snip...snip...snip...

>   FYI at one time HP made a kit that had a 8 bit ISA HP-IB card along with software and docs to let you use one of the HP drives on a PC. I used to have one but don't remember the exact name or mod…

HP 88500A is the one I have. Allows you to use both HPIB tape drives and 
disk drives
on your PC.... The package included an interface card HP88500A, 
one-meter HPIB cable
(8120-4554), a manual set: 88500-90011, 88500-90005, and 88500-90010, and a
software disk (5.25") 88500-10100...  This package formatted the drives 
for use with DOS,
so that the partitions on the drives were DOS partitions. I didn't see 
anything in the manual
about accessing LIF (or any other non-DOS file system) with this product...

Bill McDermith