On 11/24/19 7:24 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> So that sounds like a different problem. People correct me if I'm
> wrong but the exabyte drives seemed to have a head alignment problem.
They are 8mm helical-head drives. they wouldn't go out of alignment by
bumping them, the worse would be the tape would lose tension if you
smacked the tensioning arms hard enough
They do have a lot of rubber parts inside.
Rollers crack and belts go soft. I have several dozen dead EX8200s from that.
I have a whole box of 8mm backup tapes that just came in, and a small
number of working drives. The Linux software I wrote to do 9 track tape recovery
from a SCSI 9 track drive works just fine on an Exabyte.
And I'm not offering to read Jason's mystery reels.
IIRC, the main issue from back in the day was different densities on the same form-factor tapes. So if you want to the same model 8mm drive, it works, if you go to a different (older?) model, it wouldn't. Eg, going from the 8500 -> 8200 caused problems due to data density issues. IIRC, you could write low density data tapes on the 8500 for interchange with the 8200, but it wasn't the default on some platforms?
But it's been a long time and my memory is hazy... so long that Exabyte went bankrupt, several new tenants tried to rent the old space, the developer that bought it at the exabyte firesale wen bankrupt too and the new developers that bought it have torn down the old Exabyte offices in Boulder and replaced it with a set of luxury apartments... I could be misremembering...
Warner