Member Avatar for paydata

I have an HP Colorado 5GB external tape drive to backup to my PC data. As the title says it backs up my data to HP C4429 Data Cartridges, which are little 3 5/8 by 2 7/8 tape cartridges.

I'm looking for someone who is familiar with this system, that can help me out. I had a major disk drive failure on the PC that I always backup, and the software that runs the backup system was on the PC that failed.

I have plenty of backup tapes filled with valuable data, for my business but I cannot retreive the data to put it out to another PC. The reason is, that while I have the original installation CD's, when I install the software on another PC, it can't read the Tapes to restore the data.

I first installed the software on a new disk drive, and tried to restore from the Tape Drive, it couldn't read the data. but when I wrote some data from the new disk drive onto the tape, the software could restore it. HELP!

I'm thinking that the software may have had some updates over the years, and the original CD's can't read the new tapes?

Phil

Edited by Dani because: Moved to correct forum
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A few focused troubleshooting steps and background that haven’t been covered yet.

This situation most often comes down to one of three things: the backup software on the original machine created a local “catalog” or used a proprietary archive format (so a fresh install of the same program on a different OS won’t automatically see older sets), the drive/firmware/tape-generation mix isn’t fully compatible, or the tape media has suffered age or was overwritten. ’s symptom (new installs can write/read but older tapes aren’t seen) strongly suggests a software/catalog or compatibility issue rather than a dead mechanism. (community.hpe.com)

Checklist to try, in order:

  • Confirm the exact model/variant and interface (external parallel/EPP vs internal IDE/ATAPI); external Colorado units historically used the parallel port and internal versions IDE/AT — that matters for drivers and installers. Install the matching driver package (Colorado Backup/Tapecat variants exist for Win9x/NT era). (manualslib.com)
  • Recreate the original software environment if possible: an older PC or a 32-bit VM that can access the tape hardware (parallel passthrough is often unreliable, so physical legacy hardware is usually easiest). Install the original HP Colorado backup software and any supporting DLLs (users have reported missing DBDAO3.DLL/tapecat issues). (community.hpe.com)

If you can attach the drive to a Linux box, try low-level access first (Linux has ftape/mt support for QIC/Travan-class drives). Example commands (device name will vary):

mt -f /dev/nqft0 status
tar -tvf /dev/nqft0   # list files (if a standard tar/stream was used)

This can show whether standard archives are present; it won’t help if the backup program used a proprietary format/catalog. (tldp.org)

If those steps fail, stop writing new data to the suspect cartridges (further writes can overwrite older sets) and consider a specialist data-recovery service that handles Travan media — HP community threads recommend that route for out-of-warranty tape recovery. Also keep in mind typical Travan cartridge specs and expected archival lifetime when evaluating media condition. (community.hpe.com)

References used above point to HP Colorado/Travan compatibility notes, the ftape HOWTO for Linux access, and HPE community troubleshooting threads.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

Wow, memories there. The last Colorado drive I helped out on was in the 90's.

Thoughts: For the apps to work your OS should be same as before. And there is a catch 22. How to restore a full back to bare metal?
Tell more about the old and new PC OS.

I'd try Linux but only because long ago it had great support builtin to the OS for these drives.

Yes, no one I know has these any longer since the 1TB USB HDD is less than the cost of your tape drive and tapes for 1TB of backup. Most folk moved away from tape over a decade ago.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I used to have one of those. Backups took hours. Double for a backup & verify. During that time the computer was useless. Now I just use disk imaging for my system partition and robocopy for my data partition. And because of shadow copy, I can use my computer during an image creation.

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