HP-71B HP9114

[Justin Stubbs]

I have a bunch of disks that were written with the HP9114. The drives we had are shot, but theres a bunch of information on those disks. Does anyone know of anyway to get at that data?

[Howard Owen]

There's a DOS program called LIFUTIL, available here in the museum FTP site. (LIFARC.EXE is a self extracting executable.) I've been able to get this to run under MS-DOS, and it's supposed to work under Windows 9X, too. The 9114 writes double sided double density (not quad density as modern) disks with 256 byte sectors. Modern PC BIOS sometimes have difficulty with this format, but sometimes not. You may have to actually load Win9X or MS-DOS onto a machine to get it to work.

Another alternative is the one I use. I bought an HP=IL ISA card from Cristoph Klug. I use JF Garnier's EMU41 and EMU71 DOS emulators to drive the card. It lets me read and write file to and from a 9114B and LIF images on the DOS drive. These I can read using several utilities available here and elsewhere. This appeals to me because I can make it work under DOSEMU on Linux. It is more complicated, and perhaps more expensive if you have an old PC lying around. But it's just the ticket for a hobbyist.

Regards,
Howard

Edited: 29 Nov 2005, 5:38 p.m.