System/36 whining and begging...

Folks -- Thought I'd continue my unreasonable begging from the previous note back to Bill. I'd like to take on a little project of creating archival images of S/36 media. I've made a duplicate of most of what I own on fresher 8" stock. But I don't think that's a long term strategy for avoiding the inevitable ravages of media corruption. What I had in mind was something like a 'dd' dump of each disk that could be reloaded to fresh 8" media when required. I haven't given this too much thought so bear with me.... I'm working on a list of questions and puzzles to accomplish this goal.The first obvious problem is media to hardware integration. If memory serves, I read somewhere that IBM used an oddball disk format (Sellam, you might know this). 8" Shuggart drives come on the market from time to time but, would they, using low level drivers, be able to make a physical block by block copy of IBM S/36 disk data? The second problem is hardware to hardware integration. Has anyone had luck integrating a 8" drive with a more recent machine? And what are the alternatives? I presume this could be done on DEC hardware and then sent to any open platform over a network connection. Has anyone gotten an 8" floppy operating under an Intel based Linux host. That would seem the obvious media transfer station because of the wide range of hardware compatibility. Once these first two steps are done, any basic disk utility ought to make short work of creating binary dumps. An alternative approach might be to copy the disks directly on the System/36 host using platform native tools then sending the file across some form of network connection. The problem is I haven't a clue how that would need to be done. I've never read any low level API for S/36 as a platform. IBM seems to have kept anything harware layer proprietary. Any and all thoughts welcome. Thanks, -Colin ceby2(a)csc.com Senior Consultant, National Performance Engineeering Practice CSC Consulting.