Iomega Ditto external streamer under WinXP?

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I have got old QIC-80 tapes I used for backups under Win 95 etc. I want to
restore their data and burn some stuff on CD's... but have got no streamer
anymore for the restore. Now I'm thinking of Ebay-buying an Iomega Ditto Easy
800 streamer that will connect externally to the parallel port. It's a
brownish device/box of about the size of a bigger paperback book.

I did look on the Iomega website and could not make up my mind: I'm
uncertain - in fact I strongly suspect - that my WinXP will not
install/recognize this drive. Does anybody have experience with this? Will it
work?

I tried to see the list of supported tape drives in the WinXP hardware
wizard but it was all empty?? I do not have any tape drive currently
installed on my system, just a CD-ROM drive that can read and write (but not
DVD).

I really appreciate your comments.

Thanks,
Thomas
from Zurich, Switzerland
 
I have got old QIC-80 tapes I used for backups under Win 95 etc. I want to
restore their data and burn some stuff on CD's... but have got no streamer
anymore for the restore. Now I'm thinking of Ebay-buying an Iomega Ditto Easy
800 streamer that will connect externally to the parallel port. It's a
brownish device/box of about the size of a bigger paperback book.

I did look on the Iomega website and could not make up my mind: I'm
uncertain - in fact I strongly suspect - that my WinXP will not
install/recognize this drive. Does anybody have experience with this? Will it
work?

I tried to see the list of supported tape drives in the WinXP hardware
wizard but it was all empty?? I do not have any tape drive currently
installed on my system, just a CD-ROM drive that can read and write (but not
DVD).

I really appreciate your comments.

Thanks,
Thomas
from Zurich, Switzerland
Click to expand...

XP does not like most parallel port devices, other than printers. Most
parallel port tape/hard drives require direct access to the parallel port in
order to send the device controls.
 
Thanks Yves for coming back here so quickly. So your recommendation would be
to rather pass on this one, huh? Well I do understand your point about direct
access to the parallel port.

Would you have another suggestion? Get an internal tape that connects on the
floppy disk cable? I know this will be rather slow (I had that in my old PC),
but if it works... it really is for one occasion only until I have burnt a
few CD's of the old files.

You know, most worrisome I find that the WinXP hardware wizard does not list
ANY supported tape drive, so if your tape does not come with software then
you are kinda screwed anyway... I guess I may scrap the idea alltogether and
may buy an older 486 machine or Pentium II or so, unless you guys know a good
trick still. Again, most grateful for any ideas or suggestions. Thanks!
 
XP doesn't support tape drives with floppy controller connections. It does
support many older tape drives on IDE. That or a USB drive would be the
best solution. You would also need software able to read the appropriate
tape format.
Perhaps you could find a local service place to do a one time extraction vs.
spending money on tape drives and software?
Good luck.
 
Thanks GTS.
Yes, I have already accepted that a restore of my old data is a bit painful
one way or the other. :-) Data recovery from 3rd party is one possibility
(haven't looked into that yet) or I will temporarily reinstall an older
Windows version 95/98 to get the streamer to read the tapes.

Again thanks for your time and good advice. Best greetings,
Thomas
 
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