In the program collection area of this site you will find images of entire Series-80 diskettes. These were extracted from actual diskettes connected to my HP-87XM, and then transferred to my OpenBSD system. The procedure and software to do this may be found here.
From time to time I am asked how to get the images back to a Series-80 floppy. In this page we examine some of the available options.
First some definitions: There is no "standard Series-80 floppy", because HP produced an entire range of HP-IB floppy drives that are compatible either with the base Series-80 computer (Amigo protocol), or with a Series-80 computer with the EMS Module (CS protocol). The floppy images on this site are compatible with the 9121 drive (since this is the one I have) which uses single sided double density floppies. By contrast modern PCs use double sided, quad density floppies. The following is a list of choices, some are more mature and easy to use than others. Which one you chose will depend on the type of hardware you have, the operating system you want to use, and how much time you are willing to spend waiting for the data to be copied.
If you have a PC with a PC 1.44Mb drive, running Linux, then you best bet will be Tony Duell's LIF Utilities for linux.
If you have a PC with an old 720Kb floppy disk drive (double-sided, double density), you can use any binary copy utility to copy the floppy image to the diskette. Again your options vary depending on your operating system:
Following instructions adapted from the OpenBSD installation.
You can get the tools mentioned below from various sites on the Internet, but I have included copies here:
To prepare a floppy in MS-DOS or Windows, first use the native formatting tools to format the disk.
To write the floppy image to the prepared floppy you can use rawrite, fdimage, or ntrw. rawrite will not work on Windows NT, 2000 or XP.
Note that fdimage.exe and rawrite.exe are both MS-DOS applications, and thus are limited to MS-DOS's "8.3" file naming convention.
Example usage of rawrite:
C:\> rawrite RaWrite 1.2 - Write disk file to raw floppy diskette Enter source file name: GenStat.bin Enter destination drive: a Please insert a formatted diskette into drive A: and press -ENTER- : Enter
Example usage of fdimage:
C:\> fdimage -q GenStat.bin a:
Unix or Unix-derived systems invariably include the utility dd which is used for binary transfers and format conversions.
Assuming that you floppy drive is device /dev/fd0c, the command will be:
dd if=GenStat.bin of=/dev/fd0c bs=10k
This procedure also works with HP Unix systems that have the ability to use HP-IB peripherals. In this case you can connect the HP-9121 drive directly to you computer and run the above command.
I have used this procedure with my HP Integral PC, which is a 68000-based HP-UX "portable".
This procedure is similar to that used to extract the floppy image from the original Series-80 floppy. I have not tried this yet, but with only minor modifications to the procedure used for uploading floppy images, I am sure you can make it work.
Drop me an email, if you make this procedure work.
You can get cheap old ISA HP-IB cards on eBay. So I would think that it would be possible to write software to implement enough of the Amigo protocol to allow reading and writing to an 9121 drive.
Drop me an email, if you make this procedure work.