At 03:41 PM 5/5/98 -0400, Gutierrez, Manny (Miami) wrote:
>We use labeled tapes on our MPE/iX-5.5 systems and are creating
>125-meter tapes on our DDS-3 drives using FCOPY.  The DDS-3 tapes are
>sent to an outsourcing firm for printing.  The outsourcing firm has a
>DDS-3 drive attached to their NT system using a Sea Gate BACKUP.EXE
>program and are unable to read this tape.  NT does not recognize the
>label and wants to reformat the tape.
>How can NT read a DDS-3 labeled tapes created with FCOPY?

Stan Sieler already provided some good feedback on this.  I agree that it's
unlikely to address this with the Seagate backup software without somehow
writing on the 3000 a tape in a format which the Seagate software can read
(which might be hard depending on how complex the format is; for example,
does it include a directory with CRC/checksum info in it?).  (It seems that
Seagate's backup software supports reading multiple competing PC backup
product tape formats, but not one supported on MPE.  Perhaps one of them is
sufficiently simple that it can be faked easily as suggested by Stan.)

Another possible solution is to use some format which *is* implemented on
both platforms.  It used to be that (labeled or unlabeled) flat files
copied to tape were the most portable; and for many "mature systems" (such
as MPE, various Unix implementations, etc.) it still is.  However, Windows
doesn't seem to be able to read or write generic data to tape "out of the
box".

The next most portable solution (after flat files on tape) is probably
"tar", the unix-bred "Tape ARchive" format.  "tar" is available on many
systems in addition to Unix now, including MPE/iX (as of 5.0).  While WinNT
doesn't include "tar" out of the box, it is available commercially as
WinTAR-SCSI (US$80 in quantity 1) at http://www.spiralcomm.com/ which even
has the ability to download a 30-day evaluation demo.

For an excellent summary on other leads on TAR for Windows NT, see
http://elias.decus.ch/decuserve_journal/9704-3.html which parallels my own
personal research about a year ago.  The solution I wound up using was to
use Linux (which I already had installed on my personal NT system at home)
to read the tar format DDS tape onto a FAT partition which NT can see.  But
if I needed to do this repeatedly, I'd evaluate WinTAR-SCSI.

One more possibility:  If the NT machine is on network (LAN preferably)
with a machine which can read the DDS tape in any format (tar, flat file,
or whatever) which can be generated easily on MPE, then perhaps it could be
read from tape on that machine and FTPd or otherwise copied across the LAN
to the NT system, or wherever it needs to wind up.  (Just a thought....  ;)

Good luck.
--
Jeff Woods
[log in to unmask] at Tivoli Systems
[log in to unmask]   at home  [PGP key available here via finger]