On 04/28/2013 05:51 AM, shadoooo wrote: Important 730 note is that those are the microcode boot tapes. BEFORE you put on in the drive on that machine inspect the drive roller as it is more than likely failed and turned to a goo. Without the boot tapes that machine is not very useful. However the drive can be replace with an emulator as the interface is serial RS423. Good luck on a formatter. The drive has no physical EOT/BOT sense that alone makes formatting near impossible. The system senses EOT/BOT by reading the tape, if those marks are missing or the head is dirty, the usual result is you run off then end of the tape and have to open it up and thread it. If the format is missing it will without fail run off the end. So to format media you will have to modify the physical drive to ad EOT/BOT sense and the controller to likely add IO, EPROM and possibly more ram to do that. You will also need to bit by bit read the tape for the actual base format. It is far easier to duplicate the communication protocol and create a controller that uses Flash, Ram with battery backup, SD, or CF as the storage media that acts like a TU58. Also the result would not have the physical rewind delay and would be effectively faster. The other pain you will avoid is that tape availability is going away and the problem of media failure over time. Allison