28 Jan
2013
28 Jan
'13
5:29 a.m.
On 2013-Jan-28 05:22:02 +0200, Aharon Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Hi. I have two QIC 6250 tape cartridges that have been
in (I hope) dry
boxes for over 15 years. I suspect they're still usable but have no
equipment with which to test them or try to read them.
I don't think I can directly help you but did something similar
recently with very mixed results. I found a box of QIC-6150 tapes of
a similar vintage and tried to read them. Whilst I could read some
of the tapes, most of them failed in 2 ways:
1) The tensioning band broke. Where I thought the contents would be
interesting, I opened the cases & swapped the band for one that
worked.
2) There's no error correction (and I'm not sure how good the error
detection is). In many cases, I'd get lots of retries and then
some resultant data - but if I tried again, I'd get a different
length result.
I also had a couple of tapes that were visibly moldy - I didn't take
them out of their protective cases.
--
Peter Jeremy