John asks:
>
> Has anyone tried to write a DAT tape on an MPE/iX 5.5 system and read the
> tape on an NT system?  What about the reverse?


I'm not sure there are good answers for this.

So far, I've been unable to use DOS, or Win95, or WinNT to access a
DDS (aka DAT) tape in manner that a 3000 or 9000 could easily use.

Sure, it's possible to use a PC backup program that talks to a DDS,
but then you have something unintelligble to a non-PC ... unless you
reverse engineer the tape's format.  I've done this partially for
several PC based backup products (<plug> so my TINDEX tool could
at least say "hey, that's a Hiback tape" or "that's a CodeBlue/2 tape"
</plug>)...but not yet to the extent that I can pull individual files
from the PC backup tape onto a 3000 or 9000.

For me, the ideal would be to find some PC software that will do tar
format to DDS.  It's easy enough to find a tar.exe utility that creates
tar format *disk* files ... but I haven't seen one that talks to tape.

The DOS/Win/NT model doesn't lend itself well to tape drives.  They
understand disk drives, but with the exception of DISKCOPY, most tools
have a file-on-disk orientation.  They understand serial and parallel,
and to some extent network ... but tape?  I suppose one possibility
would be to use TAPEDISK (from www.tapedisk.com) to make your DDS
drive look like a disk, and then put a single file on it: a tar
file.  Then, on a 3000/9000, you could read the DDS with a home
grown utility that could rebuild a tar file from the "I'm sort of
a disk drive, containing a FAT and a tar file" data.

That said, I've had success with a tangential approach: booting to
Linux on my PC box, and using tar to/from the SCSI DDS drive.

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html