bee@watkin1.waterloo.edu (Bill E. Eickmeier) (05/05/88)
We have several Tecmar QIC60 tape backup units in our department that
have run almost trouble free for several years. The problem: we have
one tape that can be only partially read. There are about 20 volumes on
the tape (our only backup of that data, of course), but we can restore
only the first three. The rest are in never-never land. We have tried
the same tape on another QIC60 unit with the same results.
A call to Tecmar proved fruitless. They say they don't have anything
that can read a damaged tape. I was hoping they may at least have some
utility which would allow me to skip over the damaged part of the tape
and restore the other volumes from the tape. I was a little disappointed
that they had nothing (or at least nothing they wanted to share).
Has anyone else run into this problem, and more importantly, were you
able to savage the files on the tape?
Does anyone have anything (preferable C source) which allows you to
read information from the QIC60 (and how did you get it - Tecmar was
unwilling to even talk about it)? If you do, I like to try to piece
together something to savage whatever is still readable on the tape.
I've never looked at handling a tape before, so I don't even know if
I should expect it to be possible. Any help is appreciated.
In the meantime, can anyone recommend a good backup system to backup
our backups :-)
For those of you who haven't hit 'k' yet, here's some particulars.
We're running an IBM PC and DOS 3.3. In trying to get a directory
of a (damaged) volume we get the message:
Power on or reset encountered. Please press space bar to
continue.
This is odd, since we get it on two different machines, but only for
the one damaged tape.
In trying to verify the tape, we get:
Read error on tape. Please press space bar to continue.
which is more what you'd expect.
Please reply by e-mail. If people are interested I can post my
findings.
#include <standard.disclaimer>
Bill E. Eickmeier, Kinesiology, U. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
INTERNET,ARPA,CSNET,MILNET: bee@watkin1.waterloo.edu
BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: bee@watkin1.waterloo BELL:1-519-885-1211(x2972)
UUCP: ...!{allegra|clyde|linus|utzoo|inhp4|decvax}!watmath!watkin1!bee