Colorado DT-740 Tapes - need a tape drive to restore data 1

[RaoSuavey]

Hi Folks,
I have three Colorado DT-740 minicartridge tapes (340 mb native/680 mb compressed) that have data from 1996 on them. I'd like to restore the data on my XP Home or Win 2000 machine. A search on Colorado tape drives yields "HP Colorado". My questions are: (1) Did HP buy Colorado and (2) Which Tape Drive will these aforementioned tapes work with? Thanks Ray

 

[nryan1980]

As far as I know, HP's line of Travan drives were named Colorado, probably because their head office for Data Storage is in Colorado.
According to HP's website, the DT-740 part number refers to this:

MC3000XL tape cartridge with QIC-3010-MC format - 340MB native capacity - Package contains 1 tape
NO LONGER SUPPLIED

So, now we know these tapes have a QIC-3010 format. (QIC is the name of the standard, and it stands for Quarter Inch Cartridge/Comittee.) Now you just have to find yourself a tape drive that will read QIC-3010 format tapes.

Check out these HP links:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg11229

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg11035

It looks like the old Trakker (or Jumbo) 700 might have been the drive to write to those tapes.

Look on sites like

http://www.pricewatch.com

or

http://www.eBay.com

for some of these older drives. If you find can find a Colorado 5GB or 8GB (don't know about 14 or 20,) they will be able to read those tapes, however not write to them.

If it's absolutely crucial there are a number of data recovery companies out there that can get the info off the tapes for you, but it'll cost ya. Hope this has helped somewhat.