Hi,
HPE Ultrium 448 is an LTO-2 Drive and should be backward compatible with Reading LTO-1 Tapes.
So insert and try.
Cali
I'm not an HPE employee, so I can be wrong.
All LTO-2 drives were required by the LTO format to be compatible with LTO-1 tapes so as Cali indicates, that drive should read the LTO-1 tapes.
The usual recommendation for reading tapes is to identify the application that was used to write the data and find a version of that application that you can install for reading the tapes. The raw data can usually be read with command line utilities but that may not be easy to parse.
[Any personal opinions expressed are mine, and not official statements on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise]
>> So I don't know which Software it was. Is it still possible to read the tape?
No, you must install the backup software to read the tape.
It will probably be server software, so I doubt whether it will run on Windows 10.
Newer versions of the backup software can usually read older tapes, but it certainly won't work without it.
Ask the people who made the tape what software was used to write it, otherwise, it won't work.
Cali
I'm not an HPE employee, so I can be wrong.
It is usually possible to read the data from a tape without knowing what is on the tape. A tutorial on how to read a tape that contains unknown data is too long to provide in this forum. I think it is easiest to do using a computer running Linux where you can use the dd and mt commands to access the tape. If you do an internet search on reading tape data using linux with mt and dd you will find a number of resources. I even found some links to opensource utilities that claim to find and read all the files off of tapes.
One challenge that some people encounter is getting the OS to recognize the tape drive. You don't say whether you have a compatible SCSI controller and have the tape drive detected by the Win 10 Pro system that you were using. If your Windows computer will recognize the tape drive then a linux installation on the same hardware almost certainly would work with that same HBA and tape drive.
Good luck. Figuring out tape drives and reading tapes can be a bit tricky. It isn't nearly as automatic as connecting an HDD or SSD.
[Any personal opinions expressed are mine, and not official statements on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise]
I did some quick searching to see if I could find guidelines on recovering data from tapes written by unknown software and for reading files off tape with dd and mt, but I haven't validated the results I found. I probably shouldn't recommend any specific instructions. I found a couple of pages of tips for reading tapes or using tapes with Linux that looked pretty good, but again I haven't validated the quality of those.
It has been a while since I've tried to recover data from a tape without the correct application so I don't have the procedure on ready reference but as I recall it wasn't too difficult to use mt to read the block size from the tape drive then dd to read data at the block size that was returned from mt until dd hit a filemark. It should also be possible to use mt to put the drive in variable block mode then read with dd using large buffers. There are other utilities for Linux that can read from tape but I've used dd the most. One of the common issues people run into is that there are two types of device files and one of them rewinds the tape drive on close. You want to use a no-rewind device file when looping command line utilities.
A typical technique for recovering data from a tape written in an unknown format is to read just the start of the tape and look for a tape header. A common technique is to write a tape header in ASCII that provides information to identify what software is needed for reading the tape. I found a few web pages with guides for reading a tape header with a quick search. A couple were from pretty reputable sources.
Most tapes have a header followed by files that are separated by filemarks. Various applications have various headers and metadata packets at the start (and sometimes end) of tapes, so some data read off each end might be labels/metadata rather than files. Some applications modify the data before writing it by doing things like compression or gathering multiple files together - that data can be really hard to recover without the original backup application. Even if files are written individually there is usually going to be a catalog written somewhere that provides information like file names which makes using the original backup application preferred.
[Any personal opinions expressed are mine, and not official statements on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise]
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