Why do I feel the sudden urge to slam my head into the desk every time I try to deal with Windows?

I've been trying to get Windows 2000 to play nice with my HP Colorado 5 GB Travan drive. It is a standard IDE Travan QIC drive I installed into a USB 2.0 IDE drive box. Seems reasonable that this should work, no? Why do I need Windows? Well, as with most things Windows the data on the tapes are almost certainly in a proprietary format. So I'll surely need to read them using the same Windows program that created them.

So, I wondered if the drive worked at all. I've not used it in many years and then I only used it with tar (the standard UNIX Tape Archiver program). The HP Colorado user manual claims my tape drive originally came with Yosemite TapeWare for both Windows and Linux. This drive came from a computer show with only a user-manual rubber-banded to the drive. So I went to the HP website, found TapeWare and then installed it on Fedora Core 2. I ran the TapeWare Administration GUI, it auto-detected the make and model of my tape drive, and the drive works without a hitch. The entire process took maybe 5 minutes.

So, since the tape drive worked so effortlessly under Linux I thought I'd see what Windows had to say... For testing purposes I have Windows 2000 on a Virtual Machine running under Linux... I started up the Windows 2000 VM and once it had finished booting I told it to attach the tape drive. Windows 2000 instantly says I attached a "HP Colorado 5GB USB Device." Great, that's precisely what I attached. So I run through the wizard and it says it found no drivers (Floppy, CD-ROM, Windows update, nothing). Fine, I downloaded the HP drivers from HP.com. It sees the drivers but indicates they are not for my drive. So after 30 minutes I concluded it won't allow me to use any of the drivers provided by HP. Almost certainly because none are specifically for a USB tape drive.

Why does Windows need a driver disk? It is a Travan tape drive. Windows knows it is a Travan tape drive. By definition, all Travan tape drives from any manufacturer are essentially identical. Linux has one driver for all Travan tape drives regardless of how they are attached. Further, Linux auto-detects and silently configures the device without the need for input from me.

What is the point of even having a USB IDE drive box on a Windows system if nearly every device you might want to attach is going require special drivers that don't exist? It seems to me like this negates the whole point of the external drive box.

Oh well, we'll see how things go once I have the tapes in question. Hopefully I can devise some way to read the data from them.

Labels: linux, windows