Re: USA, "Minnesota local question" - 20Gb tape not readable

"Mark A. Manske" wrote:
 
> We have a tape from a sold company (Sony 170ME, 8mm 20Gb capacity tape that
> was saved from an IBM 7208 model 342)
> At corp we have a mammoth tape drive that we use only Exabyte tapes in.
> 
> The problem is that we can only read the VTOC (sorry I have been in the
> industry since 1984), and it "claims" that the tape
> was initialized at 5Gb, even though the operator claims that she can only
> init at 20Gb.

Don't know if your Mammoth is a dual drive, but if it is, this may
help.  I had a similar problem some years back.  I had an American
International 911-OCS 8mm dual drive.  We could not read some tapes we
got from IBM.  The drive was capable of off-line copies, however, so we
did an off-line copy from drive A (the upper) to drive B (the lower). 
Even though the drive could not read the original tape from IBM, it
successfully performed the copy, and the copy _was_ readable.  Go
figure.

-- 
-Jeff
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