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I have the following software for the IPC available for download. This is software that was bundled with the IPC, so I would assume that anyone with an IPC would have a license for use. If you have an IPC and no software, this should come in very handy. I also have a number of shareware/freeware titles for the IPC available for download as well.

The downloads are image files of each disc. They were created by reading the data off the disks on a Sun workstation. I have successfully recreated discs on the workstation by copying the images back onto the raw disk.

To be successful, there are a couple of things that you need to know. First, the IPC uses 710K double sided double density disks. These disks have 77 tracks, 9 sectors per track, and 1024 bytes per sector. This works out to a whopping 709,632 bytes of mass storage, hence the numder 710K (as in 1K is 1000 bytes). Standard double sided double density drives are 80 tracks, 9 sectors per track, 1024 bytes per sector. This works out to 737,280 bytes or 720K (with 1K as 1024 bytes).

You should copy the data off the computers raw disk device using dd. The trick is to buffer the data in appropriate chunks and to read just the right amount (too much and you get an IO error on the real HP floppies because the last 3 tracks are unformatted.) I use the following command on my Sun workstation running Solaris 7. 

dd if=/vol/dev/rdiskette0/unlabeled of=disk.img bs=9k count=77

This buffers 9k bytes (or one whole track), and transfers 77 tracks. To copy data from the image file back to the floppy, just reverse the process. 

dd of=/vol/dev/rdiskette0/unlabeled if=disk.img bs=9k count=77

Please let me know if you have any problems doing this or success doing it some other way.

DOS and Windows

If you don't have access to a machine running UNIX, then you can use the RAWRITE program. I have tested that this works to make IPC disks by running the program under windows emulation using a USB LS-120 drive on my Macintosh. Not exactly a standard setup, but if I can get it working that way, it should be pretty robust.

Macintosh

If you only have access to a Macintosh, then I can only suggest at this point that you run MacOS X, and open a terminal window and follow the UNIX instructions. If anyone gets any other bright ideas, please drop me a note.

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Peter Johnson

Last updated: $Date: 2000/10/31 19:42:12 $