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Re: X-Mode

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On Wednesday, February 15, 2023 at 12:43:44 PM UTC-5, Dennis Boone wrote:
> > I sent my tanberg tape reader and three copies of my prime exl tapes 
> > to Don Koch who was unable to access the material. He may still have 
> > the tapes. If you had access to an EXL with the tapes, I would see 
> > if he still has the tapes. There is a good deal of material I would 
> > like to retrieve from them. I wish I had copied all of it over to 
> > the Primos Side. Those archives all survived 100%.
> Ed, 
> 
> A couple of thoughts: 
>
> 1. I'm pretty sure there's no need for an actual EXL to read the tapes. 
> There may be some work needed with the raw images to sort out a blocking 
> scheme or similar. The 50-Series cart drive controllers wrapped 
> arbitrary sized host data blocks to store them on the QIC 512-byte fixed 
> blocks, for example. But data massaging of that sort usually isn't _too_ 
> hard. 

I've done this before with weird tapes and it's not too hard.  Someone sent me some tapes from a power company that were on weird cartridges.  Dennis is right that it's a 2-step process: read raw tape blocks, figure out what kind of blocking and headers have been added, strip all that out, and for Magsav tapes, run it through the emulator version of magrst, which doesn't care about physical tape records.  I'm assuming the EXL wrote tar tapes, so you might have to grab a copy of tar and hack it a bit.  Or if the EXL wrote some kind of UNIXy Magsav tape, you might have to hack the emulator version of magrst a bit.

I no longer have any tape gear, but if someone can read the tapes with mtread (an emulator utility program that reads a raw tape), I will help decipher it.

Jim

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X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@feustel.us> - 2023-02-10 07:25 -0500
  Re: X-Mode kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2023-02-10 16:16 +0000
    Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-11 02:04 +0000
      Re: X-Mode ukctya <spsrich@gmail.com> - 2023-02-11 06:05 -0800
        Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-11 19:32 +0000
        Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-11 19:41 +0000
      Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@hughes.net> - 2023-02-11 10:56 -0500
        Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-11 19:01 +0000
          Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@hughes.net> - 2023-02-15 08:24 -0500
            Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-15 17:43 +0000
              Re: X-Mode Jim Wilcoxson <prirun@gmail.com> - 2023-02-16 05:14 -0800
                Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@feustel.us> - 2023-02-17 05:51 -0500
                Re: X-Mode ukctya <spsrich@gmail.com> - 2023-02-17 07:02 -0800
                Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-17 18:46 +0000
                Re: X-Mode Jim Wilcoxson <prirun@gmail.com> - 2023-02-18 05:56 -0800
                Re: X-Mode drb@ihatespam.msu.edu (Dennis Boone) - 2023-02-18 17:51 +0000
                Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@feustel.us> - 2023-02-24 05:51 -0500
                Re: X-Mode kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2023-02-18 15:08 +0000
  Re: X-Mode bill <bill.gunshannon@gmail.com> - 2023-02-11 19:05 -0500
    Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@hughes.net> - 2023-02-15 08:34 -0500
      Re: X-Mode bill <bill.gunshannon@gmail.com> - 2023-02-16 08:28 -0500
        Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@feustel.us> - 2023-02-17 05:55 -0500
          Re: X-Mode bill <bill.gunshannon@gmail.com> - 2023-02-17 12:39 -0500
            Re: X-Mode Edward Feustel <efeustel@feustel.us> - 2023-02-24 05:58 -0500

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