Booting is not the only restriction. As far as I know, the same low level drivers in the ROM that are used for booting are also used for writing crashdumps. The problem is that short (6byte?) SCSI commands are used and the addresses wrap back to zero when trying to address parts of the disk beyond the 1.0something GB point. This means that if a dumpfile is located further out than that point on a large disk that VMS has otherwise successfully been installed on, it is possible to end up getting the lower part of the disk overwritten by a crashdump if the system should crash. It is possible to install a minimal VMS configuration on a small disk and access data on a disk larger than 1GB. However, it is difficult to use the larger disk to expand the VMS system as DEC software often wants to be installed on the system disk, ie the one that booted the system. The difficulties can sometimes be overcome but it may take an experienced VMS hacker to do this. I think the best idea is to get something like an RZ26 disk which is around 1GB and use that. It is also possible to boot the 3100 remotely Regards, Peter Coghlan.