imaging DC600A QIC tapes

[Jules Richardson]

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 17:12 -0700, emanuel stiebler wrote:
> >     http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/software/tapeutils/

Will take a look at that - thanks.

Next question - anyone think of a good reason why a lot of old tapes I
have containing tar archives seem to hit read errors at around 7.8MB
into the tape?

This is reading a pile of *unknown* DC600 tapes in a 150MB drive. I
can't think of any reason why a lot of the tapes hit problems at almost
exactly the same point; I mean the head and motor assembly must be fine
to get that far. But equally it seems odd. 

Maybe tar has a "don't break at 8MB-ish" parameter or something ;)
Or maybe the 150MB QIC drives aren't completely backwards-compatible
with the 60MB ones....

(these particular tapes are old, I don't know how many times they've
been used, what system wrote them even - but chunks of errors in the
same place seems like a strange coincidence!)

thoughts? Tried cleaning the drive already before anyone mentions it :)

cheers

Jules