The easy option is to buy or borrow a DELQA - but I think we've been there before :-) The alternative is to have someone who does have a VAX running V5.5-2 and sufficient disk space to build you a 650MB disk container file with OpenVMS V5.5-2 S/A BACKUP on it, drop it on a 700MB CD (or build a 700MB container file and zip it up and drop that on CD) and post it to you. Then you pop the CD into your Alpha and copy off the resulting container file, connect an LD device to it and just add files to [000000] until cooked. Then take that and burn to CD. If you had asked about two years ago I could have done that easily. Right now I have no VAX running V5.5-2. Why does your S/A BACKUP have to be 5.5-2? Will not V7.2 do? All you want to do is boot and install whatever version of OpenVMS you have put togetehr, no? Antonio