Dos Driver for DAT 12/24 drive

[Ayman Altounji]

Are there any dos drivers available for the 12/24 dat drive that can be loaded from a dos boot disk. This is to enable the drive so I can backup the Hard disk without starting the main operating system.

Regards

Richard Rayner

[Ayman Altounji]

There are no Backup utilities for DOS that we've tested on Compaq servers - You'd have to have an application written to access the tape drive from DOS. I have not seen an application like this. Unix and Linux have the ability to boot from floppy and restore from tape - you may want to look into one of those operating systems if you can't find a DOS utility to do what you want.

[Ayman Altounji]

Hi, I've extensively tested Symantec Ghost v6 for doing Disaster Recovery Backups. Create a dos bootable diskette with drivers for all the SCSI Host Adapters or RAID controllers in your system. Connect a tape drive to an unused scsi Port; I tested with DLT 15/30 and 35/70's. Boot the system from the diskette, ensuring it detects the HW. Load ghost, it should directly detect the tape drive (no drivers required). Select your source (most likely a mirror set or Raid5 set) and select your target device (ie: the tape drive), and off you go. I have successfully used this on HP and Compaq servers with Raid1 and Raid5 configurations, blown away the installation (by re-init the array) and restored to the original booting system. This was very fast, and worked without fail every time. I cannot say the same for Arcserve Disaster Recovery Option, which is very complex to setup, must be redone with every OS modification, expensive, and BSOD'd most of the time we tried to restore. Also note when using Ghost that the data is written in a format that cannot be recognised by any backup software and copied to a storage server, and that only one "image" can be stored per tape (I did not test tape spanning). Hope this helps.