[mdlug] REALLY old school situation

[Jeff Hanson]

Search eBay for a QIC drive that uses a more modern SCSI interface.  PCI
SCSI interfaces are sold by the pound now.

Only other possibility would be a PXE boot from a NIC but an ISA card will
require a boot PROM.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:14 PM, Raymond Ingles <sorceror171 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
> _______________________________________________
> mdlug mailing list
> mdlug at mdlug.org
> http://mdlug.org/mailman/listinfo/mdlug
>