Tape Conversion

[Michael L. Squires]

> 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