Hi,

Your degausser was not strong enough. It only partially erased the DAT
tapes and left just enough signal on them that the drive could tell that
something was there, but could not decide what to do with it. Complete
degaussing will make the tapes useable again.

Some of the credit card stripes are barium ferrite which can have a
coercivity in the 300O Oe range as compared to the ~1800 Oe of a DDS2
tape.

Regards.

Bill

Bill

Bill R. King, PE
Data Recovery International
2621 Brookridge Drive
Hurst, TX, 76054  USA

Tel 817-281-8901
Fax 817-656-0079

http://www.datarecover.com
[log in to unmask]

Specializing in 9-track, 3480/3490/3490E, DLT, 8mm, and 4mm DAT data
recovery.

Trudeau, James L wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, November 24, 1998 6:17 AM, Tracy Johnson [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> wrote:
> > When I worked for a DDS Drive manufacturing company the only thing I found
> > that worked was go to the shop floor and use one of their tape degaussers.
>                                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
>   <snipped other erase options>
>
> Howdy,
>
> Ummmm.....did that 'bout '94 or '95 to some 90 meter DDS tapes.  Rendered
> them totally unusable.
> Guess it erased the preamble info or some such.  Haven't tried it on our DDS
> II type stuff.
>
> Aside:
>
> While we were gassing (gaussing?) ourselves up with the degausser we tried
> it on the mag stripe on
> some credit cards and such to no effect.  What the devil they do to the
> molecules in them strips?
>
> jt