Please feel free to recommend specific methods of doing so. URLs to utilities known to work, and your experience with them.
I want something that just works, that I don't have to mess with for days/months. Since I have other more urgent projects and don't want to get bogged down in floppy file structure dissection.
I have a good variety of old PC floppy drives, but one slight complication is I only have WinXP machines.
Ideally there's two parts to this. One is to grab an image of the floppy (archived on PC), and be able to duplicate it. So I and anyone else can write fresh copies for the 1630.
Secondly, to get the files extracted on the PC, for examination. Not so important to me.
The biggest problem is the non-standard low-level formats HP used on the floppies, such as a different sector size (256 vs. 512). It needs a program that knows how to get at the floppy controller hardware either directly or via the BIOS.
I can't say that I've used it (I'm not a windows user), but here's a utility which satisfies your requirement to make an image and then be able to re-create it, for just about any old HP format:
http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/fdio/There's an excruciating amount of detail on floppy formatting down to the bit level, which makes me believe the author knows what they're talking about.
From a console window, it should be as simple as:
fdio.exe -dup a: <image_file>
If you can post the images, I will extract the LIF files so that they (hopefully) can be loaded into a 163x series via the GPIB port. Thanks!
EDIT: Reading more of the README, it does say that for XP you need to install the supplied raw driver, FDRAWCMD. So it's a little bit more to do, but still pretty simple.