| Electronics > Repair |
| HP 8753ES VNA - DISK MEDIUM NOT INITIALIZED |
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| 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! |
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