Can someone tell me what kind of tapes to use in a compaq deskpro 386 or for that matter what kind of tape drive is it or are they all the same. I know nothing about tape drives. I got this old pc from a Thrift shop for $5. I know the drive is working because when it boots both floppy drive lights come on & then the tape drive light.

The following is from the PC TOOLS manual copyrighted in 1990. "PC Backup supports the following tape drives manufactured by IRWIN tm: - IBM PS/2 Internal Tape Backup Unit (80 MB) - Compaq: Internal 40 MB Tape Backup (part # 108074001) - Irwin: DC 2000 series: Model 2040 (40 MB), Model 2080 (80 MB)" Is there a tape backup program on your PC? Any text files?

I saw one in the dos directory called tape.exe

Why not go into that directory and type TAPE [ENTER] and see what happens? This tape drive might need the QIC-40 tapes which are a bit harder to find than QIC-80. Maybe if you can get into the program, you can find out. You could probably also get the make and model number of the TAPE drive and search the Internet to find out what type of Tapes it takes. Compaq probably had their units made for them by another company. These tape drives run pretty slowly but they can be a good way to back up your hard drive or individual files.