It does sound like what I thought it was... But remember, the disk may not be a total loss... many, if not most, of the files are most likely still there (I'm expecting that sysgen simply overwrote the beginning of the disk with each of the .OBJs... so the amount of corruption would be no more than the largest .OBJ produced. So, later directory segments would be okay, and there would be sufficient info in them to recover those files. Earlier files would still exist, following the directory... remember, they are contiguous files, so if you find the start of one, you can get the whole file back. There used to be a utility someone wrote, ndump, which looked at the first n bytes of each block and reported on them... that way you could figure out at least where your ascii text/source files were... and RT provides commands which would allow you to grab just the blocks of the disk needed to get a file... It is possible, just procedural and time consuming... but if there is information which is important enough, it is worth it... If you can find the beginning and end of the file... you can probably restore it from the corrupted disk in its entirety... Megan Gentry Former RT-11 Developer +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+ | Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL | Internet (work): gentry!zk3.dec.com | | Unix Support Engineering Group | (home): mbg!world.std.com | | Compaq Computer Corporation | addresses need '@' in place of '!' | | 110 Spitbrook Rd. ZK03-2/T43 | URL: http://world.std.com/~mbg/ | | Nashua, NH 03062 | "pdp-11 programmer - some assembler | | (603) 884 1055 | required." - mbg | +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+