Tape imaging

[Paul Koning]

> On Aug 10, 2016, at 9:22 AM, aswood at t-online.de wrote:
> 
> I successfully took a (factory new) DEC TSZ07 SCSI tape drive into operation using a Sun SS20 and a Linux box.
> 
> Now I do have a big pile of CDC, DEC, HP, Convex and IBM tapes and I'd like to create tape images to file to save the tapes content.
> 
> What is the to be preferred procedure to image the tapes, which software to use and which kind of format to store the images?

Tor gave one answer, and it is certainly a useable one.  But the more straightforward answer is to use an existing well-defined format.  "TAP" format, as used in SIMH, will do nicely.   There are slight variations in that format, but I'd suggest looking at the SIMH documentation for a description and using that.  The summary description is in the SIMH User's Guide, appendix A.3.

I believe there are off the shelf open source tools to read a SCSI tape on Unix and generate a .TAP format file from it, but I haven't used them so I don't have the names at my fingertips.

You may end up needing to do some postprocessing for some machines, depending on what precise format those emulators want.  For the case of CDC, TAP format is good because DtCyber uses that as well.

	paul