Thanks to all and sundry for the help... I have a TU-58 drive from a VAX-11/730 sitting on top of my old PC, new rubber (tygon) rollers, a custom power cable, parts from a DataRAM chassis for a serial adapter, and PUTR from www.dbit.com all rolled together. I tested the rig by slurping up a three-tape set of Ultrix 2.2 standalone boot. Running "strings" on the first image reveals all the sorts of messages one would expect in a VAX boot program. In a few minutes, I hope to be looking at something similar for VMS 3.2. Got lots of tapes to read in. The process seems to run about 4 tapes per hour with all the seek time (the media is 4:1 interleaved which is supposed to improve performance on file access, but for a physical backup, it sucks). By tomorrow I should have something interesting. I wonder if any of the VAX emulators support console media? -ethan ===== Visit "The Seventh Continent" http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/