OK... first off, thanks to all and sundry who offered advice and assistance
that has gotten me this far.
Between PUTR and RD58.EXE, I have managed to copy a 4.2BSD tape (seems to
have a disk formatter and exerciser on it), all four VMS 3.2 upgrade tapes
and all 4 VMS 3.5 upgrade tapes. About 50% of my stuff does not read without
some cleaning. The biggest problem has been where the internal rubber
band has been resting up against the data surface for about 17 years. I
suspect these tapes haven't spun since they were used to load a VAX-11/750
about that long ago. One sad note: one of my former cow-orkers reused one
of the VMS 3.3 tapes, so that one is toast.
Something seems to be up with my system where when it hits a bad spot on the
tape, the drive doesn't return the entire block - typically only 410 bytes
out of 538. This seems to confuse PUTR which executes an illegal instruction
at that point. It doesn't confuse RD58, but it does cause it to timeout
on that transfer. I have been mucking with RD58 and now have it retry after
its 5 sec timeout, allowing me to pull the tape at the bad spot (since it
is quiescent for a few sec.), examine the area and, typically, clean the
rubber streak off of the tape with isopropanol. I have at least one tape
that has not responded any better after trying, but it errors out on block 0,
so I think I can rig things up to read blocks 1-511 and synthesize a new
block 0 from another tape (changing the tape label to match the paper label).
So now, if anyone manages to score the goodies to get up to VMS 3.1, we can
at least go part of the way up from there. Until then, these are mere
historical curiosities, but still worth the effort to recover.
-ethan
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Received on Thu Jul 12 2001 - 21:32:31 BST