Wing Commander CIC

The collection includes between ten and thirty Exatapes (8mm, 112m). These are likely to contain Origin's earliest surviving archives, material from the early 1990s (Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Ultima VII, etc.)

Our team is in the process of putting together two desktop PCs which include SCSI adapters and compatable ExaByte drives. We believe that the tapes are archives of Novell servers, *possibly* created with a backup utility called MaynStream.

What do we do? My current theory is that we can use the Linux 'dd' command to simply copy the contents of each tape into a file for later study and recovery - the goal being to get the data into our hands, given the limited amount of time and resources available at Electronic Arts. Am I correct in believing that if worse comes to worse we can simply put the copied bits back onto another tape which we can recover at our leisure?

Questions:

* Can we do this in Windows? I have never used Linux and adding a Linux partition, drivers, etc. worries me to no end. I am much more comfortable in Windows or DOS. Can we use one of the utilities listed here to do exactly this, but in Windows XP?: http://www.geocities.com/lc_castro/winnt.htm (either rcopy or the tape drive specific tool).

* If not, how do we set up a Linux partition, find drivers, etc. - and then how do we use them and transfer data back to our central archive.

* How do we maximize the speed, both technically and procedurally, given ~8 hours a day x 5 days at the EA Mythic offices?
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