HP 8753ES VNA - DISK MEDIUM NOT INITIALIZED

[mhexrobot]

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

[mankan]

Have you tried multiple floppy discs?

A workaround for your problem getting data from the unit is to build a AR488, GPIB USB controller and use the KE5FX tools, either the VNA tool or the plotter emulator.

[coromonadalix]

some small talk here :

https://groups.io/g/HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment/topic/hp_agilent_8753es_floppy/33015893

https://torlus.com/floppy/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3558

[KE5FX]

There's not much point goofing around with floppy drives or emulators.  There are a few different GPIB solutions (mine and others), as mankan says -- chances are one will work for you.

(To be fair, both are likely to involve some hair-pulling, but the GPIB approach is much more worthwhile once you do get it working.  You should think of the floppy as a workaround if you can't get GPIB working, not the other way around.)

[Stray Electron]

  First, I'll say that I don't have any experience with the HP8753 so take this with a grain of salt. But is the 8753ES supposed to use MS-DOS format disks?

     I assume that you're trying to use a (MS-DOS?) formatted disk. But you need to be aware that HP used a lot non MS-DOS disk formats.  Many of them (ironically) called LIF for Logical Interchange Format. But there many different LIF formats and most of them were NOT interchangeable!  Most HP computers such as the Integral and the HP 9000 200/300s could format their own disks but they would only work with the low density (720k in MS-DOS format) 3.5" disks and they would not work with the high density (i.e. 1.44 Mb in MS DOS format) disks. 

  Another very common problem with the old HP 3.5" disk drives is that the grease in the drive mechanism would dry out and cause the drive no to fully lift the disk when ejecting it. The result was that if you tried to insert or remove a disk it would catch on the top head and either tear it off completely or bend the suspension springs and knock the head out of alignment.  Either one would require that the head be replaced and realigned or the entire drive replaced. It was also common for the top head to damage the media on the disk and ruin the disk and cause the loss of the data on it.  I learned all of that THE HARD WAY!

[Stray Electron]

  FYI.  it's also worth noting that a lot of those old HP instruments could also use external HP-IB disk drives and those are still around (but also getting old!) Also I THINK there are people that are now making drive emulators that run on a PC and connect to the instrument through an HP-IB interface and will store the HP-IB disk drive image as a file on the PC's hard drive. 

[mhexrobot]

There's not much point goofing around with floppy drives or emulators.  There are a few different GPIB solutions (mine and others), as mankan says -- chances are one will work for you.

(To be fair, both are likely to involve some hair-pulling, but the GPIB approach is much more worthwhile once you do get it working.  You should think of the floppy as a workaround if you can't get GPIB working, not the other way around.)

Fair point. I had been reluctant to go down this path because it is yet more money being thrown at at a problem I should have resolved by now, but since it gets a human recommendation and those NI GPIB-USB-HS adapters are not too spendy I'll give it a shot!

  First, I'll say that I don't have any experience with the HP8753 so take this with a grain of salt. But is the 8753ES supposed to use MS-DOS format disks?

     I assume that you're trying to use a (MS-DOS?) formatted disk. But you need to be aware that HP used a lot non MS-DOS disk formats.  Many of them (ironically) called LIF for Logical Interchange Format. But there many different LIF formats and most of them were NOT interchangeable!  Most HP computers such as the Integral and the HP 9000 200/300s could format their own disks but they would only work with the low density (720k in MS-DOS format) 3.5" disks and they would not work with the high density (i.e. 1.44 Mb in MS DOS format) disks. 

  Another very common problem with the old HP 3.5" disk drives is that the grease in the drive mechanism would dry out and cause the drive no to fully lift the disk when ejecting it. The result was that if you tried to insert or remove a disk it would catch on the top head and either tear it off completely or bend the suspension springs and knock the head out of alignment.  Either one would require that the head be replaced and realigned or the entire drive replaced. It was also common for the top head to damage the media on the disk and ruin the disk and cause the loss of the data on it.  I learned all of that THE HARD WAY!

Yes, MS-DOS format. I do see LIF is a supported format as well and did try formatting as LIF via the menu but same outcome as above. It does seem as if the problem lies elswhere.

Interesting point about the old drives though. The eject mechanism of the drive in my machine is a little lazy and requires gentle persuasion to raise and eject properly. And as I recall the eject button was warped when I received the machine. I opened it and carefully bent back into place. I did not think to carefully inspect the heads when I did this. I think I have another weekend job up ahead 

[mhexrobot]

...I did not think to carefully inspect the heads when I did this. I think I have another weekend job up ahead 

Well, I got to this before the weekend, and I have to say the drive is in pretty tidy shape. Heads are clean, aligned, seat well with disk in place with slight spring force. No torn ribbons or signs of foreign object damage. Motor spins and head moves on access. If I can find another disk I'll give that a go, maybe a 720k if I can get my hands on one..

[perieanuo]

I remember some old machine accepting only 720k disks cause of non msdos recording and using high current write in the heads. 1.44 new disks never worked.
To copy those disks i used diskdupe sw not on the machine but on win95 desktop, he knew how to deal with sector by sector copy .
The machine was some embroidery brother If i remember wright...
To be sure,try to get those 720k first.
Br

[mankan]

I've now come up with a use case for having a working floppy, and that is to do backup of the EEPROM containing the "machine calibration" constants. Not sure if it would be possible to read and write those via GPIB.

And BTW my 8753D has no issues with 1.44MiB floppies.

[mhexrobot]

..To be sure,try to get those 720k first.
Br

So I tried this before seeing mankan's reply above. I used the old trick of sellotaping over the corner of a 1.44mb disk and reformatting. Unfortunately I get the same error...

[Stray Electron]

   I think that I tried that trick on one of my HP machines and it didn't work for me either.  On one HP machine the error message said something about it not being about to find (or read?) track 0 even when attempting to format a disk.  But I'm pretty certain that the format worked ok with a 720k disks. So it appears that there is something different about track 0 in a 720K disk and a 1.44Mb disk and that the HP machines detected that even though the MS-DOS PCs didn't. 

[Bud]

some small talk here :

https://groups.io/g/HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment/topic/hp_agilent_8753es_floppy/33015893

https://torlus.com/floppy/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3558

So this link makes a reference to the original drives TEAC  FD-05HF 5630-U, and in later production FD-05HF 8658-U. Perhaps checking these drives datasheets may give information about supported formats, bytes/sector and types of supported disks.