https://serverspace.us/support/help/dd-utilit … windows-backup/

Or get to know how to use Linux or similar *nix OS. It comes in useful at times.

It may be easier to boot a live CD (Puppy Linux?) and do the dd on Linux.

Wouldn't a sector editor do the same thing as dd?

AFAIK, you can't use a disk editor on a tape drive...

man dd

Windows drivers for vintage tape drives are hard to find, I assume Linux ones would be impossible to find unless Linux natively supports all vintage tape drives. Does modern Linux distribution still have this dd command for tape drives? Or do I need to find a legacy distribution?

digicube wrote on 2021-05-10, 04:16:

Is it possible to do a linux dd in Windows?
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/how-view-co … ape-tape-header

Use dd in a Cygwin elevated shell, or if you are on Windows 10 1903 or newer - WSL2. Who knows how Windows will expose the tape device in these cases, though.

digicube wrote on 2021-05-11, 05:20:

Windows drivers for vintage tape drives are hard to find, I assume Linux ones would be impossible to find unless Linux natively supports all vintage tape drives. Does modern Linux distribution still have this dd command for tape drives? Or do I need to find a legacy distribution?

If the drive is supported (is it SCSI? USB? IDE?) then dd will work with it as long as the driver exposes it as a block or character based device.

The 'dd' command itself just works with blocks - any device exposed in that standard way can be used with it - it doesn't need to know any of the physical properties of the drive itself.

Of course if you have something fancy like an autoloader library, it won't know about that or tape change commands, but once a tape is loaded/selected it should work with it quite happily.