> On Aug 10, 2016, at 9:22 AM, asw...@t-online.de wrote:
>
> I successfully took a (factory new) DEC TSZ07 SCSI tape drive into operation
> using a Sun SS20 and a Linux box.
>
> Now I do have a big pile of CDC, DEC, HP, Convex and IBM tapes and I'd like
> to create tape images to file to save the tapes content.
>
> What is the to be preferred procedure to image the tapes, which software to
> use and which kind of format to store the images?
Tor gave one answer, and it is certainly a useable one. But the more
straightforward answer is to use an existing well-defined format. "TAP"
format, as used in SIMH, will do nicely. There are slight variations in that
format, but I'd suggest looking at the SIMH documentation for a description and
using that. The summary description is in the SIMH User's Guide, appendix A.3.
I believe there are off the shelf open source tools to read a SCSI tape on Unix
and generate a .TAP format file from it, but I haven't used them so I don't
have the names at my fingertips.
You may end up needing to do some postprocessing for some machines, depending
on what precise format those emulators want. For the case of CDC, TAP format
is good because DtCyber uses that as well.
paul
