Hi
Over the past 12 months ive been trying to get my A3000 running again and i can finally say its now working as well (or better) as it ever has, i made a list and bought the following items: 1gig scsi hd - physical 3.1 roms - 16meg zip ram - cheap lcd monitor and also replaced the battery.
Everything seemed to work fine and i started copying everything onto the new hd, but little did i know i had a faulty scsi ribbon and everything i'd copied over approximatley 30kb was being written with errors! After much copying and formatting i had virtually lost everything and i was still unaware about the faulty ribbon cable.
At this point i was getting desperate, one of the hd's - an old 150mb 5 1/4" Conner had stopped spinning-up and i was down to my emergency floppy of HDToolbox and QBack/Tools. Luckily i had QIC tape backups of everything i had lost (done in 2002) and i set about restoring my boot drive. My tape drive (Archive 2150s) started to re-tension/rewind the first tape as normal but this seemed to go on for longer than i remembered so i ejected the tape.....HOLY CRAP!!!! virtualy all the tape had been pulled out of the tape case and tied itself in knots around the drive chassis and mechanism! As you can imagine i was a bit p!$$ed off about this so i pulled the tape drive and the 5 1/4" hd and skipped them thinking they were dead, after all it was mid 1980's hardware.
When i went back to the Amiga a couple of months later i found none of the remaining drives (2 x Fujitsu hd's + cdrom) would work and after a bit of swapping around i found just one (the 1st) of the six connectors would read & write to a drive reliably. I have now fitted a new (not so easy to find) scsi ribbon and all my tests seem to suggest i have solved that particular problem but i guess i will never know if the tape drive and hd i skipped were actually fully functional.
The tape i lost contained all my installed software: Final Writer - CED pro - MUI - Tim Martin's SID (i didn't like Dopus) PPaint - QBack - Diavolo - Cando - Audition 4 - Mod Trackers - TurboPrint and so on....... its not the end of the world i know but the Amiga feels a little dumb without it. I still have QIC backups of my original os3.1 (a lot faster than current standard install) and 10 years worth of work on my own audio files and Mods ect. I will be asking the Amiga.org members for assistance in many matters in the future but my priority is how to get my remaining backups off the QIC tapes and on to my hard drive, i had a good UK source for old hardware on EBay (hjcomponentsales) but he's recently moved over to chips only.
So my question is.... does anyone have an old "Archive 2150s" QIC tape drive (preferably half-height) for sale in UK or know a trusted UK based hardware recycler that could sell me one thats a bit cheaper than current Ebay USA prices, i would probably have more options if i could be sure that other manufacturers tape drives could read the Archive 2150 format, but thats the only tape drive ive ever used.
Thanks
