Help needed to read "foreign" cartridge tapes

nmeth nmeth at prlhp1.prl.philips.co.uk
Sat Sep 16 02:48:23 AEST 1989


We have some antique Philips PMDS II systems running Sys3 Unix which
we intend to junk, moving the applications onto Apollos under bsd4.2.
There are several megabytes of current project data, plus loads of
cartridges of archived prject data that we want to either move to
the Apollos, or be able to access in the future if necessary.
Ideally we would prefer to not have to load all this data onto the
PMDS and then transfer (using Kermit?).

So...
 1. Has anyone information on the tape format used by the PMDS II
    (It is a quarter inch cartridge, but we think it predates the
    QIC format - needless to say, everyone who should know within
    Philips left the company years ago :-) )
 2. The data has been archived using dump/restore.   This doesn't
    exist on Apollo Unix - anyone ported a copy, and where can
    I get sources.
 3. Is it possible to read non-QIC cartridges on Apollos?
 4. If non-QIC cartridges can't be read by Apollos, can Suns read them??

Any other help will be very welcome - its starting to look as though
we are going to have to load all this data back on to the PMDS and
push it across a serial connection (and the PMDS doesn't even have
UUCP or any form of networking!!).

	Nigel Metheringham
	Philips Components Application Lab
	New Road, Mitcham, Surrey, UK
	phone: +44-1-648-3471x3528	fax: +44-1-648-4018
	email: nmeth at prl.philips.co.uk



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