Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

[Dennis Boone]

 > > Using dd to read tapes to disk discards the block size information.

 > And that is precisely why I'm thinking of an ad-hoc interface rather
 > than just plugging a SCSI drive into a UNIX box.

It's eminently possible to image tapes sanely on a unix box.  See e.g.:

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/software/tapeutils/

The main limitation seems to be that it's hard to get the (broken) data
from a block that had a read error when using SCSI hardware.  There's
probably a way around this if one digs into lower layers of SCSI magic;
I haven't gone looking.

De