It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/LaundryMan2008 on 2025-03-05 22:00:07.

Since the last post about the tape drives (Might have bitten more off than I could chew with some LTO tape drives : r/DataHoarder) I ordered a USB to UART cp102 bridge (not sure if it’s the right adapter to use) which I had to wait 2 months for (thank you Royal Mail for losing it) and wired up the power connections in the meantime which allowed the sled to be powered and have its built in fan scream at me.

I traced out the power connections with a multimeter and sacrificed a MOLEX to SATA adapter to use the MOLEX connector which I soldered onto the edge connector of the sled, I also used the pictures that someone from the previous thread has provided to find the UART Rx and Tx connections and solder some paperclip headers which are a bit small but will work as shown by the terminal, an issue I ran into is that the tape drive will not power on using the plug provided with the sled (tried other tape drives to no avail, one I’m trying to reprogram is IBM HH SAS LTO-5) but I can power the tape drives externally via a separate SAS cable which I definitely know isn’t normal.

I then set up PuTTY and the drivers for the USB UART adapter which went smoothly, I then opened a terminal using the settings that were shown on the LTO drive conversion GitHub post’s picture of their software and the only thing displayed is a grid of dots and the occasional letter x and I can hear PuTTY complaining every time a line of that comes up but there isn’t an error message that pops up at all, in fact I haven’t ever gotten any error messages telling me what went wrong at all, even when opening a terminal doesn’t give me an error message but makes the error sound if something isn’t set correctly, it only gives me an error message to say fatal error if I unplug the adapter so I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong as I don’t know which signals are Rx and Tx and only found out by trial and error as one way yields me no result on the terminal but the other way gives me the dots and the Xs.

What should I correct to get the tape drive to turn on and am I using the wrong software to perform the reprogramming/conversion? (I will want to go one step at a time by resolving the tape drive not powering on first and then tackling the software side of things once completed)

The 3D printable IBM HH LTO tape drive bezels are done but I would like to wait until I can release the post documenting everything I have done with these tape drives to have everything put together.

Thanks again for any help you give and I wish you a great day, also please don’t downvote my post of help because that isn’t any more helpful than not helping

What I used for wiring the sled, the top mentioned on the diagram is the side facing you normally and the bottom is the side hidden away from you with all of the connectors on it

My connections, had to use some Blu-Tack to hold the headers in place as the paperclips were too thin

This is the result when connected correctly (I believe so as the other way with Rx and Tx yields no result) and flow control set to the default which was XON/XOFF

This is the result with flow control turned off, reason for more data is because I went off to make tea (can’t activate windows after each reinstall (not enough money, too lazy and no point with a cracked copy) so I’m just leaving it unactivated, also it’s a cracked copy so theoretically it should be working just as well as an activated copy)

These were the settings used on the GitHub post but they reprogrammed their tape drives by using Linux and a script but if it’s possible I’d like to do it a simpler way with putty (if I can send raw hex data packets via that) without any complex Linux wizardry (never used it but have seen people at my work experience throwing slurs when it takes their server down for the umpteenth time)