TU80 and F880 magtapes, cleaning and usage?

From: <felten(a)vaxnet.de> To: <cctech(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 2:58 PM Subject: TU80 and F880 magtapes, cleaning and usage? I know nothing about neither Emulex nor PDP, but I do know about 9 track drives, especially M4 and Qualstar. Have you seen http://www.electrovalueinc.com/9_track_drives.htm ? The drive has built-in diagnostics, so this is the first thing to try. Tapes deteriorate with age, so that could be the problem too. Another problem could be "stitching", which looks as if layes of tape are glued together. According to the web site mentioned before, the drive is 1600/3200 bpi, so you will not be able to read 800 and 6250 bpi tapes. For cleaning, you need isopropylalcohol. Dont forget to clean the "knife" just in front of the read/write head. Some drives (I am not familiar with the Cipher drives of that period) have a small "vacuum cleaner" just before the read/write heads. If you cant get it working, and nobody else can help you, I would be happy to try to read the tape and copy it to a CD. Please see my recent mail "Most Significant Bits" All the best Nico