so I sorted through my last weekend's bait, hooked
up my new HSZ40
(with 50 GB in 4 StorageWorks boxes plus all sorts of tape drives,
TSZ07, TLZ07, TZ68, and ~88) to my PC for FreeBSD. It's so much
fun to read a 9-track reel from a FreeBSD PC (just too bad it doesn't
have a transparent top cover to show off the reels).
I have bulk-erased a bunch of TK50 tapes in the hopes that they
would work as DLT III and IV tapes as well, but these drives
still went into write-protect mode. Does anyone here know details
about the DLT media? I mean it is a well-known fact (and I proved
it to myself many times) that CompacTape I works just fine as
CompacTape II. So why not as III and IV? Is it really the tape
or might it be some notches on the cassette that are used to
code the kind of tape?
The problem is I didn't get any tape media for my nice DLT tape drives
and this stuff is so darn expensive if bought new. Any ideas?
I really hope you didn't wreck that TZ86 and TZ88, thankfully these are the
DEC drives and I think they might be more forgiving than something like a
DLT2000 or DLT4000 drive. IIRC, the TZ86 is capable of reading TK50 and
TK70 tapes. There is a drastic difference between TK50/70 and DLT III & IV
media! I don't remember the specifics on the differences, part of it is
that it writes in a different manner, and part is that the tape is
different.
Zane