damont

In an earlier post I first discussed the difficulties I was having getting certain QIC-150 style tapes read. Some further progress has been made in getting my tape drive up and running again, but it's not there yet.

In the meantime, getting one specific tape read was becoming rather time-critical. So, on Wednesday I started contacting various data recovery places in the area. Four of the first five I contacted said they couldn't help. The other thought they might be able to and were going to call back with a quote, bit never did. The sixth place said they could do it, but they're in Fredericksburg; and it sounded like my tape itself might still be good... in which case they could recommend a place which was closer to me (and therefore would have a faster overall turnaround), and would be cheaper to boot.

So I called up Number Seven, and he said yes, he had the appropriate drive. I trundled off to take the tapes over, which took far longer than it should have because it was Friday afternoon with all the traffic inherent thereto. Around 7 pm I was informed that he had, indeed, successfully read the tape, and was writing up a CD-ROM with the data on it. So tomorrow morning I shall pick up the tapes and the CD-ROM, and by Monday morning should be e-mailing code samples to the folks I interviewed with back on Tuesday. Woohoo!

The guy remarked that the previous person who'd brought in similar tape cartridges had not taken nearly as good care of his tapes as I had of mine. I feel a bit justified in being so anal-retentive about how I stored these tapes. BTW, I plan to continue working to get my own tape drive working. I'd rather be able to read the tapes myself, especially the ones I haven't found yet (oops). So a big THANK YOU to all who have helped so far with the tape drive, and hopes that I'll be able to get the sucker working before too much longer.