Things we forget

I am mucking around with an old computer, trying to get an old Colorado tape back up working, for some strange reason. so I thought I would install Windows 98Se on this drive, but no drivers for USB Optical drive or USB full stop.
LOL
I have even forgotten how to partition a drive, we used to use Fdisk, I forgot about that.,

Why do I do these things?

By all accounts the tape software works with XP, so I will try that instead, It don't work with 10, I tried it a while back.

Windows 98 did support USB 1.0, but that only meant slow devices like keyboards and mice. USB 2.0 would have been needed for optical drives; that didn’t exist until after Windows 98 was released.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I have even forgotten how to partition a drive, we used to use Fdisk, I forgot about that.,

Of course Windows 95, 95 OSR2, 98, 98SE, ME are all underpinned by DOS, so you have to manage the disk and partitions in the way DOS does. Hence fdisk, but with 95 OSR2 and later you had FAT32 for larger partitions.

By all accounts the tape software works with XP, so I will try that instead, It don't work with 10, I tried it a while back.

Is it a parallel tape?

To use a USB stick or similar on 98SE you need a "mass storage class" driver from a third party, some ideas:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7...

It is IDE, I have got a parallel one somewhere,
Thanks for the link, i will have a look at that, I gave up last night, but will give it a go again when i have a bit more time

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Why do I do these things?

Answering your rhetorical question 😅 Must be like playing around with classic cars or bikes or indeed anything from a bygone era. Perhaps you derive some sense of satisfaction or nostalgia from it.

At the very least it's a cheap hobby.

Windows XP did not work as planned, it installed okay, but the software for the tape drive is not compatible. What I may do is put a more modern OS on the machine, maybe a linux distro and run a virtual machine on it, and install 95 or 98se on that, should have done that in the first place. See if that works,
But it will have to wait for a few days, but I will put the machine back together at some point, going to be nice weather tomorrow and Thursday, apart from maybe a bit of rain on Thursday, so going to make the best of it

You would still need drivers for a VM. Linux probably supports the drive via ftape. But any data on the tape was probably written with a proprietary Windows backup program, which would be a problem.

I presume you want to read the tapes. I can’t think of any other reason to revive a bit of hardware with less capacity than a cheap USB stick.

I will stick Linux on and then use a virtual machine on Linux to run Windows 95/98. It will be interesting to know what I stuck on the tapes all those years ago.


it is strange that now I can get a lot more storage in a thing I can hold in my hand or stick in my pocket with ease.
A mate still uses tape for back up, it is a slightly newer type than mine, can also hold a couple of terabytes I think. The reason he still uses it because it can;'t be attacked by ransomware and that sort of thing.
The one i have is 8GB, compressed, I don't know if it can do anything larger, not that the tapes are produced now, I don't think, plenty of second hand ones.
I just find it interesting, I got the drive from a mate years ago, used to use it to back stuff up, even then, we had CD writers.

If I get it going, I may keep it going and put documents on it, just for the fun of it.