Other Untested

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Untested & Unknown

This page covers the drive families Tapewyrm has a profile for but has never run on hardware: Conner (and Archive) drives and the Iomega Ditto. Treat their profiles as starting points. If you have one of these drives, start with --profile auto and report what answers.

Status

Profile Drive family Wake sequence Timings Status
conner Conner, Conner-Archive QIC-80 drives Soft Reset (1), wait 1 s, then Enter Primary Mode (30) Colorado values (2.2 ms Step period) Untested placeholder
iomega Iomega Ditto, QIC-80 and QIC-3010 generations Soft Reset (1), wait 1 s, then Enter Primary Mode (30) Colorado values (2.2 ms Step period) Untested placeholder
mountain ftape's Mountain wake: Conner, Archive, Summit/Mountain, COREtape, ComByte, PERTEC Soft Select (23) + its literal 20-pulse train Colorado values Never run on hardware; tried by auto
insight ftape's Motor-on wake: Insight 80 / Irwin 80SX, early Iomega Wait 100 ms, then drive select + motor on for unit 0 Colorado values Never run on hardware; tried by auto

Warning

The conner and iomega wake sequences start with Soft Reset. ftape never wakes a drive that way, and a Soft Reset deselects a phantom drive (QIC-117 Rev J, Soft Reset). Prefer --profile auto, which tries ftape's methods and leaves conner and iomega out.

What to expect

  • Capability levels differ. Some basic drives do not implement Calibrate Tape Length (36) or Report Format Segments (37). Tapewyrm reads the tape's geometry from its header segment, so this matters only before the header is found, when tw falls back to 207 segments per track for QIC-80.
  • Ditto generations vary. Iomega shipped several Ditto drives with different firmware. Record what yours reports with tw drive status.
  • Timings are the Colorado values, a 2.2 ms Step period. That is over Rev J's 2.1 ms maximum. If reports fail or the drive behaves as if it was reset, copy the profile, inherit generic (2.0 ms) and try again; see TEAC FT-3010 for what a too-slow cadence looks like.

Bring up an untested drive

  1. Run tw --profile auto drive status. Note which profile answered and the vendor ID, ROM version and configuration.
  2. Run tw drive scope to confirm cue Index pulses and the ACK delay.
  3. Copy the closest profile, set inherits = "generic", and adjust the wake and timings. See Drive profiles.
  4. Load a tape you can afford to lose and run tw drive load-point.

Irwin drives

An Irwin A120/2040 on the bench answered no QIC-117 select method at all. Irwin drives use Irwin's own command protocol and the QIC-100-MC GCR recording, not QIC-80. Tapewyrm does not support them.

See also