LIFUTILS: reading and writing HP9114 compatible floppy disks

[jsi]

Tony Duell implemented in the "historic" lifutils the facility to read from and to write to floppy disks that are compatible to the HP9114 disk drive.

This feature has continued in my fork at least for the "lifdump" and "lifimage" utilities but this has not been tested up to now.

Recently I obtained a floppy disk drive for my Thinkpad T41, applied some fixes that were needed to access the floppy disk on more recent LINUX versions and could format, write and read floppies successfully. The floppy driver was tweaked with the parameters of the HP 9122D/S drive format as documented by the FDIO project.

Unfortunately I do not have a HP9114 disk drive to test the floppies that I created. I have only one floppy disk that was written on a HP9114 drive and I could read it.

Thus I have two questions:

1. Is there still any need to read and write floppy disks for the HP9114 under LINUX? Note: you must have an non USB floppy disk drive and a suitable old controller.
2. Is there a volunteer who owns a HP9114 and a HP-71 (Germany or EU preferred) and is willing to test two floppies I created this way? If so, please send me a PM. I'll send you the floppy disks.
   

Windows users may have success to read and write floppy disk images with the fdio driver and utilities (see link above). mac OS has no support to handle floppy disk drives with non standard floppy disk layouts.

Regards
Joachim