Hi All,
I've owned an old HP 8753ES VNA for a few years now but have never had an ability to retrieve data from it.
At first the problem was that I had neither floppy drive nor disk available. I may have had 20 years ago, but not since..
At some point I purchased a
Gotek branded USB emulator which I installed in the device, but had no luck getting it to run. From what I recall I was advised to try changing some jumpers, and did so to no avail. I recall faffing around with USB stick format (apparently this emulator was finicky about that) also to no avail. The VNA would certainly boot and pass self-test, but a total no go with disk write/read/format attempts.
So with such an esoteric use case and no ability to confirm nor deny this emulator was at fault, I put this problem in the 'too hard' basket until it would come back to haunt in the future.
[...passage of time...]With renewed frustration I decided to try resolve this once more. I purchased a USB floppy drive and brand new 2HD diskette online. After confirming FAT format, 512 bytes/sector would read/write on my Windows 10 machine, I went ahead and reinstalled the original floppy drive back into the VNA.
The machine boots, passes self test, and makes noises reminiscent of the '90s when attempting to access an inserted disk. A good sign I suppose?
BUT, I get "WRONG DISK FORMAT, INITIALIZE DISK" (error 77 per manual) when attempting to save.
When I try to reformat using the VNA format menu I get "DISK MEDIUM NOT INITIALIZED" (error 40).
The 8753 is a popular machine but I have found zero answers in my search to resolve this so far. Any ideas?
Mhex