imaging DC600A QIC tapes

[emanuel stiebler]

Jules Richardson wrote:

> Having received some of these in the mail, what's the best way of
> imaging them onto modern media?
> 
> I hooked up a 150MB SCSI QIC drive to my Linux PC, and it seems to be
> able to pull data off them happily (even though they're only 60MB).
> However the tapes contain multiple archives which I'm not too used to
> handling, plus the archives aren't in any format known to Linux (so I
> guess dd is the tool for the job there)
> 
> So, is it just as simple as making sure the tape's rewound, then keeping
> on issuing: dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=archive01 (with a different output
> filename each time) ?  As nrst0 is a non-rewinding device, I assume the
> tape will be left at the start of the next archive on the tape after
> each dd command?
> 
> Or is it more subtle than that and the archives aren't necessarily back-
> to-back? Do I need to be issuing some sort of mt command inbetween dd
> commands to make sure the tape's positioned at the start of the next
> archive each time?

Look for "tapetools" on the web. It copies the tape into a container 
file, preserving all blocksizes, so you can even duplicate it to another 
tape (9track,8mm,4mm,dlt,...).
Includes also a tapedump utility, so you can have a look what's inside