At my local Goodwill charity thrift store I picked up an Hewlett Packard DAT (Digital Audio Tape) drive for 10 bucks. I've powered it up with a tape and it seems to work fine, however, no software or interface to connect to my 2000 year and newer PCs that use more modern harddrives.
It seems, however, DAT still has a great advantage as far as tape drives go. I am willing to sell this but have wondered for some time, what I would need to use it in the Windows 98 SE/ME or XP OSs

BILL

I have a HP SureStore DAT8 SCSI Tape drive in my server - is that what you have?

Check the scsi ID'S and connections to make sure its not a hardware problem. Windows 9x came with Microsoft Backup - hidden somewhere in acessories and accessible by selecting C and right clicking but not instaled by default but I dont know about Windows 2000

It's a SureStore that uses DAT media tapes. I picked up several of these from the Goodwill, still sealed. I know they have worked in my music deck, but can regular DAT be used the other way?
As of yet, I have no way to interface to my modern PCs that have no direcy SCSI interface, but I have seen some cables that look to mate to parallel port(??)
I've never dealt with one before so this is new stuff. You're saying it should have drivers in Win98 2nd ED? How about Windows ME? Those are my two prior system OSes
BILL

Mainly servers or power machines use SCSI or SATA - Regular PC'S use IDE. SCSI si easier to confuigure as you can have 8 devices on 1 cable and have no master / slave woes. All you have to do is flick a dip switch or set a jumper to change the SCSI ID. Some are reserverd however, so watch out.

You can get a SCSI contrioller as a PCI card I think. I know you can get ones which look like paralell ports (But arent!) where you can attatch to certain external tape drives and cd writers etc,... but its a bit different from what you need for an internal drive.

Ill look out some pics of my tape drive setup and get sme screenshots of MS Backup etc...

You install it through add/remove and system options and can get it up. Its in 3.0 through to 9x definately and ill try to see about ME.

If you have linux you could use KDAT or Tar by the way...

Ah, in 2k its available if you install it through add /remove and system components and then you right click on the C drive and hit oproperties. Go into the tools section and select backup. You can compress selected files into archives and restore them using the same utilitty (Theres a DOS version too which is great if your whole HDD goes bust!)

It is not in XP Home but maybe in XP pro.....

(Im talking about MS Backup here)