At times I'm convinced there is, in fact, a God and his/her/its sole 
purpose is to annoy me.

I figure I can deal with not being able to what I want with the MV2K 
immediately, since I still have my MicroVAX II. The MicroVAX II has a TK70 
drive and a SCSI controller. I hooked the big ol' Fujitsu up to the 
MicroVAX II's SCSI controller, grabbed a spare TK50 tape, and hooked 
a spare SCSI TK50 drive up to my trusty Alpha.

Stuck the tape in the drive. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle. Opened the drive up 
and, sure enough, the drive has chosen a strategic moment to pop its tongue 
off. I threaded the tongue back through, but the tongue on the tape is 
still hanging out. The hub interlocks on the cartridge seem to require both 
hands to release them (probably on purpose to prevent people like me from 
doing stuff like this). Anyone know an easy way to get the tongue back into 
a TK50 cartridge?

So I grabbed _another_ TK50 and made a tape containing the TK50 files. Took 
it over to the MicroVAX II where it worked like a charm. Booted just fine, 
labelled the disk, and copied the miniroot to the disk.

As soon as I copied the miniroot to the disk, the TK70 spit the tape out 
(in the middle of writing the miniroot to the disk, I hear "BeepBeep!" and 
the green light's on). Now it will not accept a tape; when I stick a tape
in, it spools it around for a while and spits it back out. So I have a
nicely labelled disk with the miniroot in the swap partition, but I can't
boot it because my tape drive is misbehaving. 

Has anyone seen a TK70 do this before? Could it be simply demanding a 
cleaning cartridge (which, of course, I don't have)?

Ah well; I do, in fact, have _another_ MicroVAX II which has a TK50 drive 
and controller in it (it's only got an RQDX3, though, so I can't hook the 
Fuji up to it; I'll have to swipe the TK50 from it to bring up this other 
machine), but it's on the other side of town...

Sigh.

Roger Ivie
ivie@cc.usu.edu