samperi@djs.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) (08/06/88)
Most vendors of tape drives supply interactive programs that can be used to
dump/restore files under DOS. It would be useful if they also provided an
installable DOS device driver that could be used to read/write the
drive from other programs. This would involve simply placing a line like
'device=tape.sys' into config.sys, and accessing the drive by opening a
file named, for example, TAP:.
I've tried to write such a driver, but was unsuccessful because I could not
obtain enough technical information on the drive from the manufacturer (still
working on it).
This seems like such a natural (UNIX-like) way to provide access to a
tape drive in DOS, so it is surprising that such drivers are not more
widely available (admittedly, some IOCTL's for retensioning, erase, etc.
would be necessary).
Does anyone know where such drivers can be obtained for some of the more
popular drives (Archive, Everex, etc.)?
--
Dominick Samperi
samperi@acf8.nyu.edu uunet!hombre!samperi
cmcl2!acf8!samperi rutgers!acf8.nyu.edu!samperi
(^ ell)