Is there a dd equivalent for VMS?
Background: I am trying to recover some TK50 tapes that were written on Ultrix. I have a MIPS machine with Ultrix 4.5 on it and a TK50Z drive. I have been able to read some tapes but they all seem to get an I/O error after a while of reading. I think this could be due to the accumulation of oxide on the heads. Despite cleaning the heads after every tape (by disassembly and cleaning with isopropyl on a cotton bud). I think the oxide is accumulating more than necessary because of the poor streaming abilities on the TK50 drive (too much back and forth over the same section of tape). I do have more modern drives (TK70, TZ85, TZ87 etc), but Ultrix does not seem to recognise them. So I was hoping to use one of my VAX or Alpha machines with VMS and a better tape drive to recover the raw data. Ideally I would like to make a SIMH virtual tape clone of the real tape. Any other alternative suggestions very welcome.
