[mdlug] REALLY old school situation

[Aaron Kulkis]

Lesson #1.

As media becomes obsolete, ALWAYS transfer data on old media it to more
modern media.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:31 PM, Jeff Hanson <jhansonxi at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
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