WinME, Tape Drives and msbackup
by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu)
Created: Jul 2, 2004
Updated: Oct 10, 2005
http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/docs/metape.txt

[ Additions, suggestions or corrections always welcome. ]

As someone who has access to an odd variety of OSs and hardware, I 
sometimes find myself in obscure corners of the computing world.

In this case (sorry), I have an LSI SCSI card in a Windows ME box.
After installing msbackup v. 4.10.1397 from the cdrom (it isn't installed 
by default in ME), I've been backing up files to a variety of tape drives.

An HP DDS2 drive is recognized by the system and works with msbackup.
The Exabyte 8500 series and the 8505 series also work.

[Note that in both cases, the machine must be booted and then rebooted
before the tape drive shows up in Device Manager.  This isn't unique to
WinME, however.  I find the same is true for WinXP.  On the first boot,
the SCSI card is there, but the tape drive isn't.  On the second boot,
the tape drive shows up.]

However a Sony DDS4 tape drive (SDT-10000), while recognized by WinME,
is ignored by msbackup.  This suggests that msbackup has drivers for
only a limited number of tape drives and that msbackup and/or windows ME
is very different from other OSs.  In Solaris, for example, the backup
program is ufsdump and as long as the OS knows about the tape drive, ufsdump
will happily write to it.  Not so in the Windows 9x world, apparently.  

Finally, no computer writing would be complete without taking a swipe
at Microsoft.  Even though Windows ME was aimed at the home market, the
fact that msbackup is not installed during a complete, full install of
Windows ME, speaks volumes.  Remember, any Windows problem you may have
can be fixed by reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the OS.
Oh, you had data there?  That's ... really ... tough.