HP41 and HPIL 9114A

[steve]

Does anyone know if the 9114A can be used with the HP41. If so, what else do I need (other than the 82160A of course).

Does the 9114A have "standard" drives inside? I know that at least one HP model disk drive had drives that were compatible with PC interface (whatever that is) but I don't know if this one is one of those.

The drives are reported to be "stuck" which is probably not a good thing :-(

[Reinhard Hawel]

Yes you can use it with the HP-41. You are limited to 128 kBytes/disk just exactly like the 82161 cassette drive. I believe there were some programs to overcome this limitation but I may be completely wrong at this point.

You use the standard 3.5" DSSD (Double Side Single Density) 720k disks known by the IBM PC and its clones. The drive formats to 630k as I remember. The disks use a own (proprietary) format There is no easy way of formatting and using IBM-compatible disks, but it is possible with special device dependent modules. The HP-71 Data acquisition module did such things. (BTW: if somebody wants to get rid of one I might be interested :-)

I don't remember a "stuck" disk drive in my whole HP usage history.

[steve]

No, the "drive is stuck"!?!

Now I think about it, I remember having fixed a few of these old drives... The lubricant used for some of the old drives dries up and prevents the disk eject mechanism from working. Maybe it's that...

Thanks for reminding me :-)

[Dan Grelinger]

Reinhard, you are correct about a utility program to increase the usable capacity of the 9114 disk drive with the HP-41. I is a program that was included with the drive, and requires functions from the HP-41 Extended I/O Module. The program has labels that replace the normal HP-IL disk storage functions, and is fairly long. BTW, you can use double-sided double density disks in this drive as well, it won't mind. These seem to be the only ones you can find today anyway.

[steve]

> utility program to increase the usable capacity of the 9114 disk drive with the HP-41

You don't happen to know where I can get a copy do you?

[Dan Grelinger]

I can make a copy for you, either on paper or media. I would send you mail with the details, but it appears you did not enter you e-mail address in this message.

[Jean-Christophe Pujol]

Hi all! I recently bought a HPIL 9114B at Interfab. The battery was dead and was replaced. It works well and I had no problems using it with DSDD 720KB Ibm disks (double density) and even with HD 1.44MB disks (high density). Anyway, I don't recommend these HD disks because the magnetic media is not the same and could be harmful or at least uncompatible with the 9114B's heads. Another reason is that I succeed in reading DSDD disk formated on the 41 (using IL module NEWM --- command) on my PC clone Pentium MMX! Maybe some of you can confirm the following on their machine:

- download the DOS program LIFUTIL at the URL ----> ftp.math.jyu.fi/pub/hpil/ (search in child directories).

- even if you have an HD floppy drive, change it to DD 720K 3"1/2 disk drive in the BIOS each time you want to access LIF disks (= HP 41 or 71 formated disks)

- you can now use LIFUTIL to read the catalog on the disk, read LIF files to DFS files (ie DOS File System files) and write DFS files on the Hard Disk back to the LIF disk.

Caution: This must be taken with care as I did not tested it in depth and was unable to load HP 41 files from the ftp site above in my owm 41. I would appreciate a lot some feedback from people who have access to the same hardware.

This method could be useful to back-up HP 41 material on durable media such as HDD or MOdisks and make it accessible to the HP community.