So a bit of additional 'lore' which is probably obvious to a zillion VMS admins but was news to me. One can create a standalone backup tape that is both bootable into standalone backup, and has the system image on it. I did it as follows: 1) INIT the tape with label SYSTEM 2) @SYS$SYSTEM:STABACKIT Select MUA0 as the device Tell it _not_ to re-initialize. 3) Now boot this tape and at the prompt use BACKUP/IMAGE/VERIFY DUA0: MUA0:MYBACKUP.B/SAVE/LABEL=SYSTEM Now go away for a while :-) Once its done you can boot the tape and restore with BACKUP/IMAGE/VERIFY MUA0:MYBACKUP.B/SAVE/LABEL=SYSTEM DUA0: This saves me from having to change tapes in the process. On an unrelated note, I've got a Dataram MS650 board (MicroVAX III memory) and when it is installed it takes a _longish_ time to past the initialzation tests and standalone backup appears to hang when run. Has anyone seen this? Is this perhaps a bad memory chip that is being constantly repaired by the ECC logic... --Chuck