HP Colorado 5GB external Tape Drive

[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

[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.

[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.