installing TSz07 tape drive

[The_Ube]

I am trying to connect a tszo7 tape drive to my VAXstation 3100 through the external scsi port. It looks like a normal 68port scsi port. I have a some cables lying around that seem to convert the 50 pin scsi on the tape drive to the 68 pin scsi that I need, but when I connect everything up all I see is pkb0 has 84 errors. Any ideas about how to go about getting this tape drive to work?

[The_Ube]

After looking around on the internet it would appear that the 68 pin scsi port on the back of the Vaxstation 3100 is different then the standard 68pin scsi-3 connector. Could anyone confirm this?

[Sharkonwheels]

To be quite honest, I don;t remember the VS3100 having a standard SCSI port at all. Wasn;t it a special cable required?

Either it was the wrong gender, or it was a wider centronics-looking interface.

I know there was something different, as I had to chase down the SCSI cable. I have no more vaxstations, and sadly, the last SCSI cable I had I think got thrown out accidentally in a stack of old useless mac cables.

Tony

[MattCarp]

I also have a TSZ07 I bought a few years ago with the idea of playing with it hooked up to any of my SCSI talking machines.

I hooked it into my Windows XP machine that has a SCSI interface. The SCSI interface sees the tape drive, but Windows doesn't do anything with it. I tried Windows Backup and it also didn't offer the drive as a backup target.

After some quick checking, it appears that Windows doesn't have built-in tape drive support.

I haven't tried Linux, but I don't have Linux drivers for my SCSI adapter.

I understand the tape drive is an OEM'd Cipher Data 955-S, so I wrote an e-mail to National Peripherals who support the old Cipher drives as well as performa a variety of 9-track services.

They wrote back that they only knew about two Windows 9-track programs: NovaStor's backup program and Tape Utility and CHI Corporation's OutRight. They told me that OutRight sells for $750. I went out to the NovaStor site and IIRC the tape utility is $600+ The backup has a personal version for about $75, but that's still too high for me.

I'd just like to write some files out to tape and then read them back. I don't have to recover/restore any data from an old tape. Ideally from a Windows machine.

Have you tried this? Can you recommend any software I could use?

The TSZ07 seems to be a nice drive.

-Matt