Date: Sun, 07 Feb 1999 11:46:26 -0500 From: Drew Derbyshire <software@kew.com> To: Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: You bring the hacker, I'll send the hardware (was Re: Floppy Tape Driver) Message-ID: <36BDC362.2891F288@kew.com> References: <XFMail.990206121008.wwoods@cybcon.com> <87718.918332733@critter.freebsd.dk> <19990207001623.A14051@netmonger.net>
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I have both a an Eagle TR-3 and an old Mountain QIC80 drive which I could donate
to someone stupid^h^h^h^h^hbrave enough to revive the FT driver. I can even send
along a few tapes for each.
I personally gave up and went Exabyte SCSI.
Christopher Masto wrote:
> I have an Exabyte Eagle TR-3 drive, and I had a look at the floppy
> tape situation a while back. The driver is.. well.. inadequate. It
> makes a lot of assumptions that are quite a few years incorrect. But
> they're probably still needed if someone has those old drives. New
> drives come in all sorts of configurations and can be queried for the
> correct parameters, among other differences. Also, it's weirdly split
> into kernel and user-level parts, and makes no attempt whatsoever to
> pretend to be a "proper" Unix tape.
>
> I was going to fix all of this a while back, and I still have the pile
> of documentation on how floppy tape works. I think I planned to write
> a standard QIC header at the beginning of the tape and fake up
> SCSI-like behavior (end of file marks, etc.). Hackers have bizzare
> motivations sometimes, and my motivation for this project was to back
> up my machine so I could install it anew. Unfortunately, it's now
> been so long that I really have to reinstall _before_ I'd want to
> start on such a thing. And I'm not sure I care anymore. I certainly
> don't have the free time for some time to come.
>
--
Drew Derbyshire UUPC/extended e-mail: software@kew.com
Telephone: 617-279-9812
Harris's Lament: All the good ones are taken
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