tj@xn.ll.mit.edu (02/28/91)
Is it possible to read DAT tapes made by audio DAT recorders/players on the DAT drives often available for Unix machines? One vendor told me that the standard SunOS device driver works on their drive, so slight software modifications to read audio DAT tapes would be possible (probably load marks and such would have to be overridden in the tape driver to get the audio tapes read.) Is there any hardware reason why this would not be possible? - tj. -- tj@xn.ll.mit.edu Thomas E. Jones home (617)965-2125 work (617)981-5093
kev@hpcpbla.HP.COM (Kevin Jones) (03/01/91)
The obstacle to doing this would be the firmware running inside the tape drive. This code expects to see the additional formatting information that's built on top of the DAT audio format. This formatting information is generated by the drive during writes, and includes information such as record lengths and the location of filemarks. HP DAT drives expect to see this formatting information when they try reading the tape. If they don't see it they will report errors back up the SCSI bus. > Is there any hardware reason why this would not be possible? If drive firmware existed that supported reading "plain audio format" then it would be possible to recover audio data from tape and return it to a host via SCSI. Then you could start worrying about the drivers in the host supporting it :-) HP has not produced any such firmware for its DAT drives. I do not know if any other DAT drive vendors sport this featurism. Regards, Kevin Jones. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Kevin Jones. | Hewlett Packard Ltd, | Computer Peripherals Bristol, kev%hpcpbla@hplb.hpl.hp.com | Filton Road, | Stoke Gifford, Tel: 011 44 272 799910 (ext 22351) | Bristol. BS12 6QZ. | ENGLAND. ----------------------------------------------------------------- This response does not represent the official position of, or statement by, the Hewlett-Packard Company. The above data is provided for informational purposes only. It is supplied without warranty of any kind.