The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/LaundryMan2008 on 2024-12-27 20:34:16.
I am the crazy person that bought the 4 broken LTO tape drives if anyone else bid on them, I was able to successfully fix 2 of the 4 for now (don’t have a read write compatible tape for the LTO-5 tape drives but had a LTO-3 tape which worked with the LTO-4 drives), one had a stuck tape which I removed, unfortunately (because I will now need to buy a tape to test the LTO-5 drives instead of the one that came with the lot so that tape is going on my wall) the tape was chewed up and ripped off but I was able to thread the leader back into the mechanism so it now loads tapes and works like it should (didn’t get a FC card and cable just yet because of this hurdle), the other one that I fixed with a mystery error was a mech error 5 which was 2 stripped gears in the loading mechanism which I used my broken tape drive as a donor for but it had bad heads too so I also gave the error 5 drive some new heads from the donor drive.
What I bought: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267094647139
Edit: bad link, not sure why it’s sending me to a tape library but if you search broken LTO tape drives and turn on sold listings then you should find a listing of 4 LTO library drives with one having a tape stuck in it for £42 which is the one I bought
The drive with the stuck tape was a HP FH LTO-4 FC drive so I couldn’t test it any further and see if it showed up because I didn’t have a FC card but the other IBM HH LTO-4 SAS tape drive worked but had the library setting turned on so I couldn’t use it but since I had a donor drive, I just took the motherboard and swapped it which made it show up on ITDT and passed all of its tests with flying colors.
Before I go ahead and order any tapes or cards for the real moneymakers which are the LTO-5s (intended on keeping the HP LTO-4 drive and selling the rest because I want to have a tape drive of every even numbered generation so that I could fully read and write all of the LTO tapes in the series with the least amount of drives and the money from selling the rest of the tape drives will go towards an IBM 3592 TS1130 drive to mess around with and set up on my system), I will need to convert the tape drives from library mode into standalone internal drives so that they would show up as normal because I don’t have spare motherboards to swap in so I would like to learn how to convert a tape drive to make it show up as normal for now, for future use and so that I could make a step by step guide that is easily understandable by a mere mortal then just the Linux wizards.
I read the GitHub post on doing it but had a hard time understanding on how to do it partially because I mainly worked on electronics and hardware and also because of neurodivergence making it hard to understand stuff if not explained in a simple way, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) I understand the electrical part which I’ll need to get a USB to UART converter (I understand that I can’t simply use the USB data connections so that’s what the UART converter is for after reading up on serial standards) and connect up the wires to the right connections on the tape drive but then actually sending the command to the drive is confusing to me because the GitHub OP used Linux to achieve this and I tried setting up WSL for it and creating the bash script before getting any hardware but it gave a error about not finding the USB device which I can understand but I wanted to know that a solution will work properly so that I don’t buy unnecessary stuff and also I would like a simpler solution than sorcererous Linux incantations cast on the tape drive because I read a few comments on the post where they sent a 0 to the drive and received the tape drive model and firmware back which means that they used some sort of terminal software and typed in the 0 and the hex command themselves instead of a bash script and got the response in a human readable way which I would prefer for myself and future people that would find the simpler step by step guide that doesn’t involve Linux for those people that can’t use it or aren’t as tech savvy.
GitHub post: https://github.com/AC7RNsphnHVbyT4/ibm-tape-drive-automatic-standalone
The final step after getting the other tape drive online and working would be to make a .STL and 3D print some faceplates which you guys would appreciate over the overpriced bezels on eBay and to put on my tape drives, I will also make a documenting post on my repair journey and my pitfalls.
A video of one of my tape drives after repair: https://imgur.com/gallery/video-of-hp-lto-4-tape-drive-working-after-threading-leader-tape-back-through-mechanism-HxWT6G7
Thank you for your help and I hope you got warehouse sized hard drives for Christmas to hoard on :)
Edit: don’t downvote my question of help for god’s sake, I hate that going to the right sub and asking there only gets me downvoted with no help at all D:
Some spoilers of my repair work that I’ll make a journey post on (I already make these types of posts on vintage appliances forums where I document what I did restoring something)
Tape in a mess of ribbons and you can see the leader clip hanging out the front
