[rescue] Reading QIC tapes

[Alan Perry]

I have a bunch of QIC tapes that I need to images, including some that I need to do soon to prepare a VCF exhibit. 

I now have four drives, none of which work. Two are the normal Sun ones in 411 cases, Archive Vipers, and two are the full height ones that came with Sun 3s and 511 drive enclosures.

I could get one of the Archives to IDENTIFY to scsi-probe but the capstan roller was a gloppy mess. The other Archive would cause the SCSI bus to complain but has an excellent capstan roller. So, I swapped logic boards between drives. Now the drive with the good board and roller can load tapes without mucking them up and responds to mt commands. However, reading and writing tapes with dd does not work.

Reading always returns 0 records read. After rewinding, skipping reports the tape is at the end. Writing, after detecting the write protect was enabled and changing that, returns I/O error. Tried four different tapes with labels indicating something on them and got the same results.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

alan