26 Nov
2012
26 Nov
'12
5:56 a.m.
On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Chris Elmquist wrote:
On Sunday (11/25/2012 at 09:34AM +0100), Jochen Kunz
wrote:
I've been able to recover tapes that were damaged by a gooey capstan by
reading the tape until a bad block appeared, cleaning the head, and
repeating.
Each pass transfers a little bit of goo from the tape to the head,
eventually removing enough to read the block.
On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 13:00:11 -0600
Chris Elmquist <chrise at pobox.com> wrote:
Exactly... because then I can transfer images in and out
via SD card,
ethernet, wifi... and I can put it together in an afternoon with parts
on hand.
maybe it is time to revisit the solid-state
emulation.
Perhaps a job for a BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi these days...
Thats like killing a
fly with a sledge hamer. A smalish Atmel ATmega and a SD card could do
that job perfectly.
See also:
http://www.sparetimegizmos.com/Hardware/TU58_Emulator.htm
Yup. No longer
available.
Yup. Lots of solutions existing as code to run on a PC, Unix,
Linux. Should be a no brainer to port to a small ARM platform such as
I mentioned.
I still like (kind of a love-hate sort of thing) the real TU58 though.
It's love-hate because even my "new" capstan rollers have turned to goo
after just a few cycles of the tape past them. So, I am exploring the
Tygon tubing and some o-ring options next.
Additionally, I found that the DC100A cartridges I have that were
labeled with hand written "4500" stickers are all unreadable in my drive
(before the capstans failed). They all returned "block not found"
error no matter what block I try to seek. I have concluded these were
reformatted into some other non-TU58 format and so they became donors
for belts to fix the other tapes that were labeled "DEC". And so now,
I have recovered five tapes that appeared to work error free in my drive
until the capstans melted.
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist