HP Tape drive for Christmas

So on the 24th I trucked up to Milwaukee (from Chicago) for a $100 SGI haul, the star of which was a working Crimson with three hard drives. Brought back the Crimson and some Indigo 2s (which will be for sale/trade/free as soon as I inventory them.) There was supposed to be an O2 as well, but it went missing. So for the pre-arranged price I asked to hunt around the shop for a replacement item, which turned out to be the back-breaking HP 88780B 9-Track Tape Drive! A fair trade-up, I'd say. So I've got it home and onto a table. This may be old-hat to some, but having never used a 9-track before I have to say the air-powered self-threading mechanism is the coolest thing I've seen all month. I loaded a blank tape for the self-test, which passes. Now to get it to write some real data, and eventually use it to rescue some old tapes I've had for years as well as the one I bought at VCF. I'm guessing that any modern *nix machine should recognize it and be able to read it. I planned on using a Sparc IPX or something similarly portable when I get one formatted and loaded. In the meantime, I have my laptop. Is there any chance of getting WinXP to use this beast? I have a SCSI PCMCIA card on the laptop which I've used to read old hard drives, but drivers will be the issue here. I know in most cases the backup software needs to be able to handle the drive as well as the OS - anyone tried to use Backup Exec or any of the other big commercial s/w with one of these? Thanks in advance... -- jht