When designing the 9845, HP developed a new concept they called the 'unified mass storage model'. Also see the HP-IB Tutorial for more information on the HP-IB. And it can be used to prepare images for the HPDrive program, an HP-IB mass storage emulator.Īlso see another program, the HPDrive utilitiy for emulating vintage hard drives on a PC in the HPDrive Project section. For vintage HP drives it supports all the AMIGO and the CS/80 or SS/80 command sets. It works both with 9845 and LIF file systems, handles hard disk drives as well as tape drives and supports access to non-standard floppies in standard PC floppy disk drives.

It can initiate diagnostics on the HP-IB bus, on drives connected via HP-IB bus or on vintage floppy media. It can also restore original media from these images. It can dump sector-by-sector images from HP-IB drives or floppy disks in order to archive the original media content. It can convert files from one file to another, including the conversion of data and program files, so that they get readable and editable on a PC.

It is able to list the contents of file systems and to extract files from drives connected via HP-IB, files included in binary images and files from old non-standard HP floppy disks. The HPDir program is much like a swiss pocket knife for vintage HP drives, media and data.

Original vintage mass storage peripherals and media shall be controlled, read and written directly from a PC without any other vintage system involved.

Binary images of HP 9845 media have to be handled in order to create, duplicate and initialize image files, and to maintain all the files which are stored in the binary image.

There are two main reasons for the HPDir program:

How to format a floppy disk as hfs old