[mdlug] REALLY old school situation

[Raymond Ingles]

I'm hoping to pull some data off some old backup tapes. These are 1997-era
QIC (quarter inch cartridge) tapes. Back in the day these drives would be
hooked up to a floppy controller. Not the fastest thing in the world, but
they could hold 120MB.

I've been trying to resurrect a 1994-era machine with a Colorado 350 drive.
(32MB RAM, Pentium Overdrive 83MHz, ISA and VESA bus, etc.) Obviously the
BIOS is too old to boot off of CD, and no USB at all. (It doesn't even have
PS/2 mouse/keyboard hookups.) I've got another machine with a floppy drive,
to make boot floppies, and I've tried to get the old one to boot off
floppy. I've tried Debian 3.1, 3.0, and 1.1, but they always fail trying to
use the root floppy. Kernel panic, etc. I know I ran Linux on this box once
upon a time.

The backups were made with tar and cpio using the Linux ftape kernel
driver. My next step is to try to get an old Linux with ftape (the ftape
driver isn't in modern kernels) onto a slightly more modern machine with a
floppy controller, but extracting the tape drive from the old machine is a
serious pain. I may try to boot up Slackware or Red Hat on the ancient
machine first.

Anyone have any suggestions? Or even (yeah right) a working QIC floppy tape
drive system?