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From: everett@hpcvra.cv.hp.com. (Everett Kaser)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Reading HP instrument disks on a PC
Message-ID: <31600018@hpcvra.cv.hp.com.>
Date: 22 May 91 15:16:22 GMT
References: <1991May21.090824.12630@lut.ac.uk>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA
Lines: 23


 J.A.Jones@lut.ac.uk (Jeff Jones) writes...
>We have a number of Hewlett-Packard instruments, many of which have
>built in floppy disks for the storage of measurement data. It would be
>very useful to be able to read these disks on a PC. The various manuals
>	Jeff

The format of the disks is something that was designed by HP in the late
'70s and is called LIF, short for Logical Interchange Format.  It is a
flat file system, consisting basically of a two sectors (I believe) "header",
mostly containing just a volume label, directory size, and a couple of other
things.  Then comes the directory, which contains name, size, and location
of start of file on disk information (amongst other things).  The directory
is then followed by the data sectors, with all sectors of a file contiguous,
making the files non-extendable.  There are many different file formats of
course.  HP sells a utility (called something like "The LIF-MSDOS Utilities"
or some such, that will allow you to read/write LIF disks on a DOS computer,
translating various LIF file formats to DOS files.  I don't know a part
number, but an HP sales rep could probably track it down for you.

Everett Kaser                   Hewlett-Packard Company
...hplabs!hp-pcd!everett        work: (503) 750-3569   Corvallis, Oregon
everett%hpcvra@hplabs.hp.com    home: (503) 928-5259   Albany, Oregon