Thanks for the info. I was worried that I needed special disks, these ones are holding up for now. my machine has a drive for 4/8gb tapes. I have never seen such a drive on a machine till this one. I am used to DDS DLT and LTO tapes.
Unfortunately, what i thought was a nice new 4gb ibm branded tape sealed in box turned out to be some kind of test tape. So that is no good for backups. I bought a bunch of other sony tapes, but they are only 525mb. Will those work in my drive as well? As a last resort, i see a scsi connector on the back of the machine, can i connect any old DDS or DLT tape drive, or do i need a specific drive meant speciffically for the as400, like the hard drives? What is the name of these tape cartriges, what should i look for so i can but them online. Ive tried ebay / amazon with the term "QIC 4/8gb tape" with few results aside from the drives. --Devin On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Paul Berger <phb....@gmail.com> wrote: > Devin, > > The backup command is 'savsys'. The commands on on AS/400 are usually > three letter abbreviations for in the command mashed together savsys = > 'save system' or 'work with user profiles' is 'WRKUSRPRF' and the > shutdown command 'Power Down System' is 'PWRDWNSYS'. If you type in the > command and press PF4 it will open a menu where you can fill in the options > for the command, once you get used to the commands you can type the > commands with options right on the command line for instance the command > to shutdown and power off is 'pwrdwnsys *immed restart(*no)' this is > permanently burned into my brain from back in the days when AS/400 was > still in development and the OS was running on S/38, but was a bit shaky > and prompting commands would crash the system so we learned the commands > with options. > > Since this is a 170 it probably has a QIC or 8mm tape under the covers and > the resource name for it is likely 'TAP01' savsys will by default create a > bootable tape that can be used to restore the OS. You may want to test > booting from the tape you created by changing the IPL tpye on the operator > panel from the usual "B" to "D". The D mode IPL specifies booting from an > alternate IPL device which is normall tape or CDROM. You may not be aware > that you cannot just throw in any SCSI disk, the disks have to be the > specific disks that are blessed for use in an AS/400. > > A quick google came up with a site http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/ > as400e.htm that seems to have some of the 170 manuals linked. > > Paul. > > > > On 2017-04-09 1:21 PM, devin davison via cctalk wrote: > >> Alright, it was quite a while back that I picked up my ibm AS400 model >> 170. >> I had asked some questions on the list, it was locked with a password and >> i >> could not get into the machine. I finally got around to getting into the >> machine and am at the main menu. Before i do anything, I want to back up >> the machine. I have a couple of tapes. >> >> I am not familiar with os/400 at all, the intention is to backup the >> machine so in the event of a hardware failure I will be able to reinstall >> and still have a licenced install. >> >> I come from the sgi land, usually from the prom there is the HINV command >> to give a nice hardware inventory of the machine, is there a similar >> command in the ibm world? I want to find what options are installed, cpu >> and memory details, etc. >> >> Any advice on what to do from here is much appreciated. I just want to get >> the thing backed up and rest assured that if the drives fail i can >> reinstall the os and it have its license. >> >> --Devin >> > >
