HP Tape drive for Christmas

[Curt @ Atari Museum]

Yes, BSD and Most Linux's see it.    Win 98 and NT don't always like 
9tracks for whatever reason, but XP works fine.       dd works fine and 
you can install unix utils for XP and through a cmd window run dd and 
access many tape contents.



Curt


Jason T wrote:
> So on the 24th I trucked up to Milwaukee (from Chicago) for a $100 SGI
> haul, the star of which was a working Crimson with three hard drives.
> Brought back the Crimson and some Indigo 2s (which will be for
> sale/trade/free as soon as I inventory them.)  There was supposed to
> be an O2 as well, but it went missing.  So for the pre-arranged price
> I asked to hunt around the shop for a replacement item, which turned
> out to be the back-breaking HP 88780B 9-Track Tape Drive!  A fair
> trade-up, I'd say.
>
> So I've got it home and onto a table.   This may be old-hat to some,
> but having never used a 9-track before I have to say the air-powered
> self-threading mechanism is the coolest thing I've seen all month.  I
> loaded a blank tape for the self-test, which passes.  Now to get it to
> write some real data, and eventually use it to rescue some old tapes
> I've had for years as well as the one I bought at VCF.
>
> I'm guessing that any modern *nix machine should recognize it and be
> able to read it.  I planned on using a Sparc IPX or something
> similarly portable when I get one formatted and loaded.  In the
> meantime, I have my laptop.  Is there any chance of getting WinXP to
> use this beast?  I have a SCSI PCMCIA card on the laptop which I've
> used to read old hard drives, but drivers will be the issue here.  I
> know in most cases the backup software needs to be able to handle the
> drive as well as the OS - anyone tried to use Backup Exec or any of
> the other big commercial s/w with one of these?
>
> Thanks in advance...
>