18 Jul
2006
18 Jul
'06
11:56 a.m.
Most QIC-02 tape drives have an MCU with very accessible EPROM on it. If
I had to deal with one of those, it's the EPROM where I would start,
perhaps altering a command to provide "warts and all" reading.
But with all respect to Patrick, 4mm DAT is also helical scan, just like
8mm Exabyhte. Honest. Maybe you were thinking of Travan drives?
If I had to recover data, I'd probably first try to manually position past
the overwritten area, then see if the drive could be made to pick up with
the next good block. Failing that, I'd hack the firmware to do it.
Cheers,
Chuck