James Gilbert wrote:
[snip war story]
Do you *know* it's not the floppy or parallel controller that's
damaged? (Depending on what your tape drive hangs off of). Try your
tape drive on another machine...
> So now I guess I need to tell them to buy a new
> tape drive! However, they now have a bigger hard
> disk, and Iomega don't make the Ditto Easy 3200
> drives any more, so I'm wondering if there is a
> new drive with larger capacity which will read the
> data off their old Travan 1.6/3.2 tape, and which
> functions well under Linux. Any suggestions? I
> was looking at the HP Colorado drives (5, 8 and
> 14Gb), but they seem to say on their web site that
> only the 5 and 8 Gb drives can read 3.2 tapes
> under (cringe) Windows.
>
>From what I saw, I suspect they're excluding Windows NT, rather than
Linux. I don't know how Linux is with these, but I doubt HP does
either.
Have you considered SCSI? Linux seems to have more seamless support for
that. (You could pretty much stop hanging out on lists and on the
floppy tape home page). Take a look at
http://www.aiwa.com/csd/product/prodfram.htm
I recently bought a "naked" OEM version of one of these 8GB drives from
www.techstore.com for under $100, and it's working fine so far...
I'm not sure what your 3.2G tapes are: maybe QIC-3020? If it's that,
the AIWA's supposed to be able to read it.
And a SCSI controller? Not hard to find, or expensive. Mine at home
inhabits my SoundBlaster sound card.
Good luck...
