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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/T0rg0spizza on 2024-04-09 00:09:27.

I’m working on a side-project that I literally inherited from my father a little over a year ago. Back in 1998, he was in charge of shutting down one of the GameTek studios (which is an entire story by itself). Amongst his boxes was a set of five DDS2 backup tapes and the prototype N64 cartridge of Robotech: Crystal Dreams. The game was never released, but my son and I did a dump of the prototype cartridge and released it.

I’ve started to focus on the backup tapes and seeing what secrets they may contain. This is very similar to the Frogger 2 restoration project (). My goal is to extract the data and post it in a similar manner. I’m aware of the potential legalities, but I’m operating under a preservationist perspective . I had to do a bit of investigation work first. GameTek used a collection of Mac Quadras 840av, PowerPC 8100/100av (of which I have two still working), somewhere an IRIX Indigo server was in the mix, and the file servers used Netware File System. I had to source a DDS2 compatible tape drive and got a STD2401LW drive from eBay. I’m using a 68-pin to 50-pin SCSI adapter to my Adaptec 2940 card and put the drive into narrow mode. Using tapeimgr I was able to do a dump of the first tape and figure out that the backup software used was ARCServe 6 and a block size of 512k.

Thanks to the Internet Archive I got the closest version that I could (ArcServe 9) running on a Windows XP machine that my dad had laying around. I started a merge operation on the first tape and I’ve verified that indeed - this ***is*** a backup of the source code repository. However, the bad news is that the merge operation is failing about 34 minutes into the operation on session #3 which is where it got interesting where there were some design files for another prototype: Cajun Racing.

The errors are all media “unrecoverable data error” related. Even after running a clean, I’ll get E6052 Sequentional Positioning Error, E6092, E3713, E3803 Invalid trailer signature, E3802 Invalid header signature, etc. The error varies on the merge session. I’ve tried to merge the other four tapes using ARCServe, but the software reports that it can’t find the 4th session so nothing happens.

At the moment, I’m a bit stuck as to what to do. ARCServe isn’t the most user friendly piece of software and I can’t figure out a way to tell it to just ignore read-errors and continue onwards. I’m trying to be cautious as well since the tapes are old, despite being kept in a dark temperature controlled room. I was able to restore by tree for session 2 and as much as I could get from session 3 but the file sizes are all 1K (Netware to NTFS issue?). How would I get the remaining files if I can’t get past the merge error on the first tape? There was one registry hack to “DonotUseCatalogMerge” but that doesn’t seem to help. I’m more than happy to provide any additional information.