[HECnet] Tape drive explosion

[Ian McLaughlin]

It works!

After much fooling around, I figured out what was going wrong.   I hate to admit the largest of the problems, but I guess I should come clean...

After writing and reading DLTIII tapes to make sure the hardware was working just fine, I moved over to using TK50 tapes to see if I could read them from Linux.   No matter what I did, I was not getting a VMS-style tape.   In fact, I was getting back the same data that I had written to the DLTIII tape for testing????   Was there some buffer somewhere?   No, the machine I was testing from has a DLTIII tape drive installed internally, as well as the external tape library I was playing with.   All my testing was actually being done to a tpe installed in the internal drive - I was using the wrong device name.

Oh well, after wasting a few hours on that, I figured out the correct device name, and performed the tests again.   Everything started working!   I have now grabbed about 20 tapes and archived them.   One tape got stuck in the drive, and a couple of tapes are coming up with read errors, but I am able to read a surprising number of them.

I'm starting to post the tapes up on my archive page here:

http://www.vaxhaven.com/index.php?title=TK50_Image_Archive

You should start seeing more appear as the evening progresses.   The images are in SIMH format, which is documented on the SIMH site.   A better programmer than I should be able to write a VMS program to read SIMH tap files and write them to real tapes.   This would close the loop.

I'd appreciate feedback if anyone has the opportunity to test some of these images.

Ian