Brian Todd
Experienced Member
I have been having issues trying to transfer files from my 486 rig to my HP 110 Portable Plus via the 9114B disk drive and figured out it had something to do with the formatting of the diskette. I managed to get hold of the HP110.SYS driver (which was originally made by Sydex) and had some "fun" playing around with it. The basic idea is to install it on the 486 machine and to add the following line to config.sys: "DEVICE=HP110.SYS /D:unit /F:format". The value of "unit" can range from 0 to 3 and represents the physical diskette unit to be used to read and write the HP 110 diskettes. If this unit is normally called A: on your computer, then the value of unit is 0 (which is the case for me). The value of "format" is 1 in my case as the floppy drive is a high-density unit.
When the machine boots into DOS, HP110 DOS diskette unit 0 should be accessible as drive D. This is indeed the case with my rig, however, when I try to access drive D, I keep getting a drive not ready error. Note that I had formatted the floppy in the 9114B drive, but also tried standard MS-DOS 720k formatted disks. Out of sheer frustration, I transferred the software to the 9114B formatted floppy via the standard A drive (with HP 110.SYS loaded) and then popped it into my 9114B drive. To my surprise, I could transfer the software to the Portable Plus with no issues whatsoever!
Whilst I managed to do what I set out to do, it still seems strange that I had to access drive A rather than drive D as the attached write up suggests. Does anyone else have any experience in using HP110.SYS and if so, what is your experience?
When the machine boots into DOS, HP110 DOS diskette unit 0 should be accessible as drive D. This is indeed the case with my rig, however, when I try to access drive D, I keep getting a drive not ready error. Note that I had formatted the floppy in the 9114B drive, but also tried standard MS-DOS 720k formatted disks. Out of sheer frustration, I transferred the software to the 9114B formatted floppy via the standard A drive (with HP 110.SYS loaded) and then popped it into my 9114B drive. To my surprise, I could transfer the software to the Portable Plus with no issues whatsoever!
Whilst I managed to do what I set out to do, it still seems strange that I had to access drive A rather than drive D as the attached write up suggests. Does anyone else have any experience in using HP110.SYS and if so, what is your experience?
