I need to find out how to read old data tapes for the school treasury.
They have many tapes that contain the only copy of payroll records.
I found that a Tandberg 4220 drive should be able to load the tapes. What I am looking for is a program to read them.
I have nothing to go on except that "someone" thinks it was a cobol program that was originally used to store the data.
I have a pcx SCSI card that I hope to use with a new drive found on eBay.
I use OpenSuse 11.4 - KDE presently.

Any leads would really be helpful and appreciated.

thanks

kumado

Without knowing how the data was written or anything about the application makes it difficult to provide help. There are lots of ways to read the tape but without knowing how the data was formatted makes it a bit of a challenge.

You could examine the data by reading a block using the dd command and looking at it via a hexdump utility. There might be a magic number or header that could provide a clue.

You could try just dumping the tape via tar or cpio and see if it just works.