Hello,
I was referred by a member, Peter Wallace.
We are trying to recover some programs from 9-track backup tapes.
I have a working 92185 drive, and had salvaged a SCSI - Pertec formatted
interface
converter off the back of a Cipher 990 drive at work. The Cipher 990
was total
crap, hardly ever worked. The SCSI converter actually worked for a while, I
was able to read a few blocks of tape (without a proper program to
handle the
format, I just did stuff like
sudo cat /dev/st0
on a linux system, and got info that looked like the first couple
records off a tape.
Then, the converter died, it stopped passing its internal self test.
But, I had proved the
92185 drive is OK. So, now I'm looking for a way to read these tapes.
The best solution
would be an off-the-shelf SCSI - Pertec converter, which were made some
years ago,
but will be hard to find on eBay or such. Another way is to find the
SCSI interface
board for the 92185, but I've never found one to buy. Another way is to
get my
Vaxstation running again, the hard drive blew, so it would take some
effort to get
that back up. I have a Dilog DQ15 controller for it, and if that won't
work, I probably
have another tape controller, too. Another problem with the VAX is I'd
have pull
all the data off the tape over a serial interface, it was last running
VMS 4.7 without
TCP networking.
Anybody got any goodies in the basement, any good ideas of how to
interface it,
etc.?
One other choice is to build my own FPGA Pertec interface. The
formatted Pertec
interface is about as simple as you could imagine, but I'd need to add
an SRAM
buffer to the FPGA to handle up to 64K byte blocks.
Jon