31 Dec
2007
31 Dec
'07
2:51 p.m.
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
31 Dec
31 Dec
3:02 p.m.
Yes, BSD and Most Linux's see it. Win 98 and NT don't always like
9tracks for whatever reason, but XP works fine. dd works fine and
you can install unix utils for XP and through a cmd window run dd and
access many tape contents.
Curt
Jason T wrote:
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...
3:11 p.m.
On Dec 31, 2007 5:02 PM, Curt @ Atari Museum <curt at atarimuseum.com> wrote:
Yes, BSD and Most Linux's see it. Win 98 and NT
don't always like
9tracks for whatever reason, but XP works fine. dd works fine and
you can install unix utils for XP and through a cmd window run dd and
access many tape contents.
Interesting...could Cygwin do the job? I see AT&T has "uwin" now too
(or maybe it's been around forever and I just discovered it?)
3:15 p.m.
Jason T wrote:
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?
Tivoli Storage Manager still supports 9-track, and I think the IBM
9-track SCSI drive is a close relative of yours.
Failing that, if you have bootable Linux CD, it should deal with the
drive just fine.
Doc
5:43 p.m.
On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, Jason T wrote:
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 have an IBM 9348-012, which is essentially the same beast. It works
fine under Linux, with a PCMCIA SCSI card.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
5967
days inactive
5968
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us -
silent700＠gmail.com