6 Jul
2018
6 Jul
'18
6:50 p.m.
On 7/6/18 5:22 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
3M 600HC?
I saw the same thing on brand new ones of those. The only tape I've ever gotten
to mount was a 16track HP labeled tape with ME10 on it.
If it
hasn't been used recently, it is a certainty the capstan is goo.
No, I fixed the capstan, and I'm using brand new IOTAMAT tapes still in
the original shrink wrap, but only one drive will even certify tapes and
none of them will write them.
They're IOTAMAT. I don't know many of the format details but they come
preformatted from the factory and idiots treat them like QIC (because it's
the same form factor) and demagnetize them. Or, they send you DC600A tapes
"because they look the same."
Some of the details are in the earlier HP manuals pre 914x and in the HP Journal
articles on the 9144 and 45. The recording format has redundancy where logical blocks
are chunked and written redundantly across physical blocks, then error-corrected on
read. Block labeling and soft EOT BOT marks are written full track when the tapes are
made. There are no EOT/BOT holes, so inserting a tape in a QIC drive just runs the tape
off of the BOT.
I hate these things even more than ordinary QIC tapes, and that's saying a lot.