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Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige

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I think you'll have trouble reading those tapes today. I did a pile of them about six years ago and it was dicey then. Problems you'll run in to, most of which have already been mentioned:

1. Capstan pinch roller turned into goo. Will leave residue on your tape that's hard to clean off.

2. Cartridge drive belt broken. They often break while you're reading the tape, and you won't notice until so much tape has piled up inside the cartridge that there is no way to recover.

3. Drive EOT sensor broken. The drive will just keep on going and rip the tape off the reel. You can fix this but it's really hard.

4. Oxide flakes off the tape and gums up the read head gap.

I'll second the suggestion that you find a QIC-150 drive if possible.

If you can get the tape to read, there is good news on the software front. You can unpack your rbak tape data with an open source version of rbak available at the Apollo Archive.

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Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige Phil M <lamont1900@gmail.com> - 2013-11-13 12:16 -0800
  Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige supervinx <nessuno@libero.it> - 2013-11-17 01:20 +0000
  Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige Kurt Nowak <kurt.m.nowak@gmail.com> - 2013-11-19 12:12 -0800
  Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige usenet@hoffart.de (Goetz Hoffart) - 2013-11-20 09:40 +0100
    Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige Kurt Nowak <kurt.m.nowak@gmail.com> - 2013-11-20 10:52 -0800
  Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige Jim Rees <jim.rees@rees.org> - 2013-11-25 17:31 -0800
    Re: Transfer Data from Tape Cardrige Phil M <lamont1900@gmail.com> - 2014-10-10 11:53 -0700

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