Set up tape drive to archive 7 track tape reels by recording flux transitions and decoding by software

PREPARING TAPE DRIVE FOR 7 TRACK TAPE RECOVERY

Computer History Museum aims to preserve software history by reading and archiving mag tape source material, some of which are too degraded to read on standard tape drives. When data recovery services also fail to extract the contents, extraordinary measures are needed.

The early efforts were focused on 9 track tapes, using a logic analyzer with very deep memory to record the raw flux transitions from the tape head as tape streamed past. This data was analyzed by software that handled skew, bit crowding and other effects of magnetic recording to produce an image of the tape contents. Len Shustek was the primary driver of this effort, with help from Paul Pierce and Al Kossow. 

It is time to begin recovering 7 track tapes, using the logic analyzer and a suitable drive where the raw flux transitions can be captured. Museum staff had two transports in the queue for modifications to handle this task, a Qualstar 1052 and a faster, more capable HP 7970E. For both, they physically installed heads with seven tracks, where they waited in the queue to be wired up and adjusted.

Ken Shirriff and I stepped in to help get the first of the transports working with the 7 track head. The new head was actually a dual 7 and 9 track reading head from a different system, with cables ending in winchester type high density connectors. We had no documentation on the pin assignments for the head.

The Qualstar drive had three connectors which attached to its original head assembly, but with a service manual available on Bitsavers we would know the pin assignments. These connectors were .1" spacing types, two of them were 10x2 double connectors and one was a 3x1 single row. Our job was to appropriately mate the heads to these connectors. The museum was willing to have the high density connectors cut from the new tape head, leaving only the more standard .1" types. 

One of the 10x2 connectors was on a PCB and this one attached to the read side of the original head assembly. The other two connectors were for the write and erase heads, thus we detached those cables frm the drive entirely. Using the schematic we drew out the pin assignments on our 10x2 connector.

After severing the cables from the new head to detach the high density connectors, we prepared these to solder onto a new PCB we would make. The outside stiff plastic shield was trimmed back, exposing a shielded braid and a number of twisted wire groups inside. As expected, there were seven groups of wires, one per track on the tape head.

All seven tracks had the same color coding on the wire groups. The group was three wires, red, blue and white, twisted together to help with shielding from outside EM fields. Using an ohmmeter, we decided that the white wire was a center tape on each coil in the head, with blue and red providing the pulse as magnetic flux changes passed under the head. 

We arbitrarily assigned blue to represent the + polarity from the schematic and red for -, and prepared for wiring. One thing we could not determine was which track each group of wires belonged to. We handled that later.

We made use of a small breadboard PCB, trimmed down to size, where we could install a 10x2 set of .1" spaced pins to accept the connector PCB from the tape drive. We would install 10x1 pin rails on the reverse side to the outside of the connector we just built, allowing us to solder the fine wires from the tape head. 

One complication came from the nature of these breadboard PCBs - the holes that are spaced .1" apart are bridged together in six rows, thus the connector we would place in the middle would by default have each pair of pins in a column shorted together. A box cutter and additional work with a small screwdriver broke the traces on the PCB to isolate the breadboard into two rows of three interconnected holes, allowing the two sides of the 10x2 to be electrically isolated.

I drilled two holes in the PCB to allow use of a cable tie to hold the end of the tape head cable down to our new board. Soldering was straightforward although not easy due to the fine wires when stripped and springiness of the wire insulation. Forceps, two of use working in concert and a bit of care allowed the soldering of all seven tape channels to our board. 

I grabbed a L plate to mount this new PCB inside the tape drive chassis in a convenient spot. It required the drilling of one hold through the side of the drive chassis and we had our new board plugged into the tape drive read head connector PCB and everything securely mounted.

This particular tape drive has a read electronics circuit which first amplifies the head signal through a differential video amplifier, then further boots it with an op-amp. The logic analyzer will pick off the analog signal at the output of that op amp. We knew they needed at least 2 volt swing on the op amp output to decode the transitions well, thus our first check was to see the signals produced by a test tape. 

Success, with approximately 7 volts peak to peak coming from the output of the op amp! We had two more checks to make, before we could wrap up the job. First, we had to verify that all seven tracks were functioning properly, producing good signals out of the op amps assigned to their channels. Second, we wanted to determine the ordering of the channels to know which track each represented, from top to bottom of the tape head.

The Qualstar drive was built as a 9 track machine, therefore the read board had nine channels which were exact copies of the video amplifier, op amp and other circuits designed to handle a single tape track. We were only using 7 of them, obviously. These were channels 100, 200, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 900, to use the naming from the Qualstar schematic. 

Ken came up with a clever way to identify the order of the channels from top to bottom of the head. Using diagnostic mode on the drive, we could command it to drive the tape forward at a steady rate, while we watched signals from the op-amp outputs. Ken took a sheet of paper and slid it down between the tape and tape head, watching carefully to see which of two op amp signals would decline first. That told us which of two channels were closer to the top.

Now, it was a simple matter to keep moving the scope probes around, doing pair-wise comparisons, until we had a definitive order from top to bottom. It turned out that we had channels, from top to bottom, of 

• 100
• 200
• 500
• 900
• 700
• 600
• 800

We know that the parity track is at the bottom, with the least significant bit of a character at the top. That allows the museum to wire the logic analyzer appropriately and recover the 6 bit data characters plus parity as flux transitions.