Last call: imaging Prime tapes & disks

[Jim Wilcoxson]

As part of my general downsizing, I'm going to be parting with my gear
to read / write Prime SCSI disk drives, 9-track tapes, and 8mm tapes.
Soon. If anyone has media with Prime software to contribute to the
emulator software archives, let me know: prirun at gmail.com

Here's my typical process, for anyone curious:

- read in the tape / disk
- delete anything that isn't Prime Computer Inc. software
- remove all serial numbers and customer ID info from the Prime
software

I started the emulator project with almost no Prime software, so
contributions from others are what it possible to run different
versions of Primos on the public emulators possible. But there is
still a lot of missing software, and a lot of missing source, so
donations are welcome!

Here are links to the programs I use to read and write tapes:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B32sxduygeufOWJhMGQ5YWItYWU5MC00Nzc4LWI2YmItODJjYjQwYTJhOGRm&hl=en_US

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B32sxduygeufM2FiNGUwZTMtYWIzYy00YzM4LTgzMmMtMzU5MTBhNjE3OGQz&hl=en_US

You're welcome to use these programs to image your own tapes if you
like. The parts (SCSI controllers, 8mm tape drives, not so much 9-
tracks anymore though) are on eBay for not much money. I put a post
on the forum a while back about imaging Prime disk drives. Pretty
easy, but you need to use sg_dd to image the drive.

[Edward Feustel]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:49:24 -0700 (PDT), Jim Wilcoxson
<pri...@gmail.com> wrote:

>As part of my general downsizing, I'm going to be parting with my gear
>to read / write Prime SCSI disk drives, 9-track tapes, and 8mm tapes.
>Soon. If anyone has media with Prime software to contribute to the
>emulator software archives, let me know: prirun at gmail.com

Jim,
Do you happen to have a Prime Excel (unix) SCSI cartridge tape drives?
I have a bunch of my mail, etc. on some of the old cartridges.
Apparently these old drives had special microcode that permitted a
non-standard record size. And with my cartridge drive, I have not been
able to retrieve the data.
TIA,
Ed Feustel

[Jim Wilcoxson]

On Sep 27, 11:21 am, Edward Feustel <efeus...@hughes.net> wrote:
> Jim,
> Do you happen to have a Prime Excel (unix) SCSI cartridge tape drives?
> I have a bunch of my mail, etc. on some of the old cartridges.
> Apparently these old drives had special microcode that permitted a
> non-standard record size. And with my cartridge drive, I have not been
> able to retrieve the data.
> TIA,
> Ed Feustel

Hi Ed - sorry, I don't have a cartridge drive.

With most tape drives under Unix, you can use mt setblk 0 for variable
block mode. Then you can read whatever size was written to the tape.
If you use the mtread.c program I posted, it will work - sort of. The
trick is that these cartridge drives, if I remember correctly, added
some bytes to every record, like with the record length and a status
byte or 2. Someone sent me a raw dump from one and I had to strip out
some extra bytes in each record.

I don't think the drive has to be SCSI. Probably any tape drive that
is "recording format compatible" (QIC XXX or whatever) will work, even
if it's an IDE. Most of the cartridge drives in the consumer market
were IDE, like the Segate Hornet 10/20GB.

Here's a SCSI cartridge drive on eBay for $10, though not sure if it's
the right model for your tape:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Conner-CTM3200R-S-SCSI-INT-TAPE-DRIVE-DA0198J-/230570215879?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35af0e49c7

There are probably way more IDE cartridge tape drives on eBay to pick
from vs SCSI, but I don't think the interface matters.

Good luck!