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  • Colorado 250 tape drive

    From Bbikebbs@VERT/OLDTIME to Nightfox on Thursday, July 21, 2011 00:34:22
    Re: Colorado 250 tape drive
    By: Nightfox to Bbikebbs on Tue Jul 19 2011 10:31 pm

    Re: Colorado 250 tape drive
    By: Bbikebbs to All on Tue Jul 19 2011 16:51:00

    I have an old Colorado 250mb tape drive with a backup of my old Wildcat B tape. I have got all of the software, etc. I have tried to get it worki XP and virtual OS's such as MS Dos 5.0 and win 95 with no success. The o thing I haven't tried is to reinstall Dos 5 over my XP box. I'm trying t my software registrations for LORD, TEOS, etc. to use with my existing Synchronet installation on the XP box.

    What about it is not working? Is it not recognized by your software, or is data not being read correctly, etc.?

    Nightfox


    The unit retensions the tape when the computer boots up. However, no matter which OS I've tried, I can't see the drive. I've tried multiple ribbon
    cables and combinations with/without a floppy drive with no luck. The backup software doesn't see the drive either.

    Thanks for any help

    Scott

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    þ Synchronet þ Old Time BBS oldtime.synchro.net
  • From Tracker1@VERT/TRN to Bbikebbs on Sunday, July 31, 2011 04:04:35
    On 7/19/2011 1:51 PM, Bbikebbs wrote:
    I have an old Colorado 250mb tape drive with a backup of my old Wildcat BBS on
    tape. I have got all of the software, etc. I have tried to get it working on
    XP and virtual OS's such as MS Dos 5.0 and win 95 with no success. The only thing I haven't tried is to reinstall Dos 5 over my XP box. I'm trying to get
    my software registrations for LORD, TEOS, etc. to use with my existing Synchronet installation on the XP box.

    Anyone have any suggestions that I can try to get it working? I have another box running Windows 7 home premium to try virtual OS's.

    Just to clarify, is the issue recovering from the tape drive? If so, what kind of port is used? Parallel, Serial, SCSI, Proprietary? If parallel/serial, you should be able to map the physical port into the virtual machine for use there. YMMV in terms of the software. Dos 5/6 in the VM should work for this, at least in getting it recovered...

    --
    Michael J. Ryan - http://tracker1.info/

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    þ Synchronet þ Roughneck BBS - telnet://roughneckbbs.com - www.roughneckbbs.com
  • From Tracker1@VERT/TRN to Bbikebbs on Sunday, July 31, 2011 04:14:41
    On 7/20/2011 9:34 PM, Bbikebbs wrote:
    The unit retensions the tape when the computer boots up. However, no matter which OS I've tried, I can't see the drive. I've tried multiple ribbon cables and combinations with/without a floppy drive with no luck. The backup software doesn't see the drive either.

    Thanks for any help

    Not sure if VMWare Workstation supports floppy based tape drives, if you wanted to run a demo of that, it may work better than virtual pc, or virtualbox ... I would try VMWare workstation first for that, they tend to have the most mature hardware virtualization support.

    Best bet may be to install an older OS that can use the tape backup onto physical hardware (you mention an old XP machine), then run the restore to get the files off disk, and mount the drive in the newer machine to copy over/read them off the disk.

    --
    Michael J. Ryan - http://tracker1.info/

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Roughneck BBS - telnet://roughneckbbs.com - www.roughneckbbs.com