[rescue] UFS and HP9000 questions

[James]

I need to read several hundred 3.5 inch floppy disks that were made using
either an HP9000 or an Apollo workstation. The HP "stack" contains a 9144,
9122, 7959B and 3 300's (disks?). There seems to be a lack of info on the
web about these, though I did learn that the 7959B is an HP-IP interface
disk (I had no idea HP-IB was suitable for disk interfaces). The 9000 has a
video problem (monitor shows a verticle line only). The Apollo coredumps as
soon as I try to vi anything (not a happy machine).

I am hoping that the diskettes would be compatible with a modern 3.5 in disk
drive (720K or 1.4M) and in a filesystem format that I could read from a
Linux machine (like UFS?). I tried to read one from a RH7.3 machine but I
have to admit I've never mounted a floppy before and 7.3 has some automount
scheme. If I "mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" the drive lites up and hangs
awhile and then I get an error (sorry, don't remember the error). I seem to
recall that RH defaults to trying to mount a floppy FAT (dos) format. Would
anyone know how to convince a RH7.3 system to mount these floppies (if that
is possible)?

Any ideas/info would be appreciated.

BTW, at some point this hardware will be dumpster-bound and I don't have the
room to rescue them. They are in NH and will probably be free if anyone is
interested.