From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Sep 26 07:40:16 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BA48A16A4B3 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 07:40:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from siralan.org (12-223-227-231.client.insightbb.com [12.223.227.231]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D3F1F44003 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 07:40:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mikes@siralan.org) Received: from siralan.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by siralan.org (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h8QEeC4s059601; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 09:40:13 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from mikes@siralan.org) Received: (from mikes@localhost) by siralan.org (8.12.9/8.12.9/Submit) id h8QEeBYw059600; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 09:40:11 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from mikes) From: "Michael L. Squires" Message-Id: <200309261440.h8QEeBYw059600@siralan.org> To: jahnke@fmjassoc.com Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 09:40:11 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <1064527385.223.149.camel@zinfandel.fmjassoc.com> from "Frank Jahnke" at Sep 25, 2003 03:03:05 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL6] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: FreeBSD questions Subject: Re: Tape Conversion X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 14:40:16 -0000 > I have an old 9 track tape that, as luck would have it, contains a Don't know where you are, but in Indianapolis there were several service bureaus which do this kind of work. The cost was in the hundreds of dollars range. All of them had 9-track drives, and they would write the data to a CD. Qualstar 9 track SCSI drives turn up on eBay all the time, but whether or not the drive would work and whether or not one could figure out the input parameters is a big question. Some of the drives were sold with an ISA card and conversion software, which I think comes from NovaStor. I have bought other tape drives for a project and had no real problems reading and converting QIC, DAT, and DLT tapes at home using FreeBSD and "dd". One trick is that buffer size problems show up only in /var/log/messages. I've read tapes from IBM systems this way and then used "dd" to both input the data and convert the data to ASCII. MLS