tk50's and dlt

[joe heck]

I'd be real careful running them on a "fast" drive.  I just tried to 
archive about 120 TK50s and almost half of them stuck to the head 
because of the coating coming off and gumming up the head.  I was 
reading them on a TK70 and I suspect the high speed did not help.  I am 
going back to my TK50 to try to recover the ones that failed, although I 
do not have much confidence in that.

Joe Heck

Zane H. Healy wrote:

>>I've got a pile of tk50's I'd like to preserve
>>the contents of. Maybe 300 or so. 
>>
>>what's the fastest drive for reading them?
>>
>>I have a qbus tk70, and probably a tkz-50 somewhere,
>>but if it could read them faster, I'd be perfectly
>>willing to acquire a tz30 or a dlt. Surplus dlt stackers
>>like a tz887 are pretty cheap these days; could one
>>of those do the job?
> 
> 
> You'll want to pay close attention to what drive you get if you go with a
> DLT drive.  I think you can use up the the DEC equivalent of a DLT2000
> drive, however, it *MUST* be a DEC Drive, the Quantum drives can't read
> them.
> 
> 
>>format wise, many of the tapes are vms sw install kits.
>>
>>is there a way (ie, existing sw and formats) to archive 
>>these such that new install tapes could be cut without needing 
>>a vms system to do it?
> 
> 
> I'd recommend taking a look at the tools for SIMH, though personally, I
> always use TPC format under VMS.  It would be nice if there was a version of
> TPC for Unix, but the closest I'm aware of is a tool to convert TPC files to
> SIMH TAP files.
> 
> 		Zane
>