I'm attaching one of the smaller tape dumps that we parsed into files; when unzipped, you realize that the ZIP files can be unzipped successfully. I'll attach the companion full RAW too. It's unfortunately too big to paste here.
I'll DM you the link and the password. The DM isn't to...
Thank you Chuck - appreciate the help and time. I can send a full file as well. My friend said that some of the ZIP files (we can actually extract the dumps to files, but they're garbled) are readable because I guess the tape software couldn't compress them any further - I have to check on that.
Here are snips of the raw dumps from linux. Each tape dropped a 512 byte 0.bin and then the 1.bin was the full tape. I did a head on 1.bin because otherwise the size would be silly but here's what I'm dealing with.
Here is the TXPLUS v5.19 software from Interpreter Tape Backup Systems that shipped with their TapeXchange product, which was a SCSI tape drive inside a metal enclosure with a handle, that was meant to connect to the parallel port. We have the data off the tapes from Linux, but we can't figure...
Update - my friend found TXPLUS, but it only works with the original drive which has a parallel port enclosure. I don’t have the drive enclosure anymore because it was dead - what do folks do to try to figure out how these tape software products work to decode a dump of the tape on Linux?
I’ll get one, sure. In the meantime I may be using the term incorrectly. The files are in some proprietary format but files that were already compressed are coming out okay like ZIP and ARC files. That’s why finding TXPLUS would be so critical
For more detail - the tape drive in question (the original one) is an Interpreter TapeXchange external tape drive, which was a metal case with a nifty handle. Apparently they were popular. The power supply on the external housing was long dead, so I yanked the drive out - it was a Sankyo...
Also - a friend who is helping me try to rescue this data says he thinks it was a program called TXPLUS that was used for some of these tapes. Does anyone have a copy of that or a Linux program to read dumps?
Yes, Trantor was bought by Adaptec I think! I have TapeMate II v1.1 and v1.2. Not v1.3 - I'll grab that - but using DOSBOX or other virtualizer doesn't work with the tapes. I am not sure how to take the file dump and point DOS software at it.
Thank you for the feedback. All spot on. We are able to get the data off with Linux, but then the problem is the Trantor TapeMate II format. You definitely can see the filenames and such. Some of the tapes have degraded parts and my Sankyo drive probably did too - it despooled one of the tapes...
This is a great thread. Apologies to resurrect an older thread, but I'm facing the same issue. I have a lot of tapes that I'd like to dump and get rid of. 11 of them are DC6150 3M QIC-150 tapes. 10 were sent to me ages ago and I lazily put off doing this. I have been struggling to get the data...