Looking for someone with a working QIC tape that can do dumps...

[eeguru]

I have a box of quarter inch cartridge tape that I'd like to dump (qty ~15). Most are DC600A or equivalent. The drive targets range from 60 MB to 150 MB; mostly Wangtek. They are from/intended for AT&T 3B2 machines. I'm worried about the rollers in the carts themselves flying apart under speed. Most of the drives I own are aged to the point I know the rollers are certain to liquefy under speed. Even the newer drives (late 90s) are old enough that testing to find out would be too late.

I would pay for the service. It's all going up on a public archive in the end. Or if anyone knows of an outlet where I can buy a new'ish or refurbished SCSI QIC drive, I will go that route..

Thanks!

 

[mR_Slug]

I'm worried about the rollers in the carts themselves flying apart under speed.

These may be able to be replaced with rollers from later carts like the tandberg SLR5 etc. IIRC the 8GB QIC carts are identical to the 60MB ones, well except for the tape presumably.

Most of the drives I own are aged to the point I know the rollers are certain to liquefy under speed.

Little confused, as the drive has the capstan, or are you referring to other rollers that make up the drive mech.?

 

[Chuck(G)]

He's talking about the rubber roller that makes contact with the cartridge drive wheel. They do go to goo.

@eeguru, I can do these, but be aware if they're that old, the tension bands are probably garbage and will need replacing--and I'm on the other side of the world.

As far as the rubber in the drive, a few months back I posted about replacing it with a hunk of silicone vacuum hose. Works a treat. I used the 4mm stuff, e.g.

this part. The trick is to lubricate the inside of the hose (I used silicone spray lube) and then stretch a ring of the hose over the bare metal capstan. Let dry and you're in business.

 

[Unknown_K]

What software would you need to read the tapes (I assume they are in some funky UNIX format of the age)?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Depends on the format. Something as simple as dd often works. Very often tar will do the trick--after all, "tar" is short for "tape archive--or cpio. And, for manipulation, "mt".

If you've got a SCSI drive, often you can cobble up an archiver using the gscsi routines.

The big problem for some of the older QIC drives is finding decent drivers for Linux/Unix/BSD. Some of the old ones were pretty quirky, particularly the ones with QIC36 or QIC02-type interfaces.

 

[eeguru]

I think I found a solution. I have two Sun SCSI 150 MB QIC drives. One the roller is complete goo. The other is still solid. This weekend I plan on cobbling up a box with PCI SCSI card and connecting it. I'll try a blank tape first and make sure I can read/write reliably before diving into the archive tapes.

The format is mostly cpio. Though I'll just DD to eot first for archival purposes and parse from there.

Thanks for the feedback

 

[bear]

Just a word of forewarning, if they were created on the 3B2 CTAPE (non-SCSI) QIC, it's not a standard QIC on-tape format and won't be readable by any SCSI drive (and if you find another QIC-36 type drive that isn't on a 3B2 CTAPE controller that can read it, tell the world about your incredible stroke of luck).

If they were created on a SCSI QIC drive, those are all (or pretty much all) standard format so the Sun drive (once it's repaired) will be fine.

edit: actually now I think of it, the CTAPE isn't even QIC-36, it's a "floppy tape" type interface. So good luck. You're going to need it.