Is it possible to use a Colorado Tracker Parallel port tape drive on a 8088?

[salamontagne]

Ive been assumeing all this time that its quite possible, and the motherboard and cards ive been trying are suspect, but, haveing no success at all im starting to wonder.

I dont see a singel reason why, other then a hardware issue, that the tape drive CANT be used, anyone care to check me on this? The version of the software i'm useing loads fine, but cant format a tape, and freezes the system mid-way through a backup.

Unfortunetly, untill my frined gets his xt-ide card, this is the only way to extract the data saved on a ton of floppy discs

 

[Chuck(G)]

How about transferring the data to another PC via the serial or parallel port?

 

[salamontagne]

Worth a shot!

Worth a shot!

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm waiting to get back my old serial and parallel port test plugs back, and if the ports DO test out ok, I'll just try and use interlink and interserver from ms dos 6.22 to transfer the stuff over. I hope over the years i havent thrown out my lap-link cable!

The bad news is, i've already had to delete a couple of floppy disc directories from the drive in order to make room for the tape backup software. I made the initial assumption that i could just hook the harddrive up to a newer system and do a drive-to-drive copy. Well, live and learn...

Lesson from this: Murphy is alive and well

 

[paul.brett]

When I worked for the Post Office (a long time ago) we had a parallel port tape drive hooked up to an Epson PCe (which was an 8088/8086 clone).

It came with a setup program which could tell you (on-the-fly) how much interference was being generated by the monitor. This was supplied to help with positioning the drive. So you ran the program and watched the interference levels (not sure if it was a bar or a value) and basically placed the tape drive and associated cable in the position with the least interference.

The reason I brough this up, is maybe your current monitor is generating enough interence to stop it working altogether.

Paul.

 

[salamontagne]

I never have heard of something like that.... I wonder how it "detected" the interferance.

I got very lucky when the tape backup. Just to try it out, i plugged in a 16 bit "everything" controller from a 486 "serial/parallel/Floppy/IDE" and it worked well enough to allow the trackker to transfer the contents of the HD to tape

20megs of old data....total transfer time: 1 week

I'm sure i broke a record for slowness. I dont even think the old UNIVAC systems were this slow