I haven't noticed this coming up in a while (probably thanks to net booting)
but it used to be that people sometimes got stuck because they had no boot
tapes and their VAX wasn't running yet so they couldn't use it to write
the boot tapes...  Well in case anyone bumps into this again (do people use
tape at all any more?), I finally got around to rolling a prettier version
of my grotty tape hacking program for DOS, so if you can borrow a PC long
enough to hang a TZ30 or TK50Z-GA off of it, you can use it to write tapes.
You just need a DOS ASPI driver for whatever SCSI board you have, and then
you can do this:

C:\>set tape=scsi2:	(e.g. default HA, target 2, default LUN)
C:\>st rew		(rewind tape -- do it again if "?Unit attention")
C:\>st iput filename.ext 512	(write file to tape with bs=512)
C:\>st weof
C:\>st rewoffl

...  you get the idea, it tries to look like "mt" except it adds the
"iput" and "iget" commands, and is missing some of the fancier stuff ...

	ftp://ftp.dbit.com/pub/ibmpc/util/st.exe  (and st.txt)

If you hate PCs too much to consider even using them as a temporary
tape-writing appliance, fine, don't use the program.

John Wilson
D Bit