Somehow I missed the beginning of this thread (had a few mail probs lately), so please forgive if I am wandering too far away from the original topic, but I gather we are trying to figure out how to best preserve CP/M disks. I to agree that copying the files is not the best solution - even if you do the SYSTEM.COM thing, you still need a working CP/M boot disk to be able to make a boot disk (chicken and egg type of deal) - Having restored a number of systems for which I did NOT have an original boot disk, I can tell you that this can be an issue. I've used ImageDisk to backup and restore quite a few CP/M disks by now, and it works well, deals with system tracks just fine, and allows you to make a bootable disk from "starting point zero". It does have two limitations: - For 8" systems, you will have to attach an 8" drive to your PC ... I've put up a page on my web site which describes this in a bit of detail, including an adapter thats very easy to make to convert the 8" interface to plug into a standard 5.25" cable. - The disk format must be one that is compatible with the PC's 765 controller The only work-around for this is to use CPT. For cases where the disk format is not compatible with the PC (hard or non-IBM format sectors), I have created CPT (CP/m Transfer) which is also available on my site - CPT transfers disk images to and from the actual target system over the serial port, and can work with ANY format disk (because it uses the targets disks and controller). CPT has a different set of limitations: - The target system must have a serial port (it doesn't have to be the console). - You need to provide a very small binary serial port driver for the CPT resident client. Even if you don't know how to talk to it, looking at the device number of the UART, and a few minutes tracing vectors and disassembling with DDT will usually give you the info you need. - CPT can't always handle system tracks - CP/M does not provide a standard way to read/write the system tracks, and on some systems they are different from the user tracks and incompatible with the system floppy driver. CPT allows you to skip them, and you could use SYSGEN/SAVE to place a copy of them in the user area. - CPT requires you to have a working target system backup and recreate the disks. It *SHOULD* be possible to save a memory image of loaded CP/M and FORMAT which can be loaded into a bare system to create a formatted disk. I have not had to do this with CP/M yet, but I have done it with Cromemco RDOS which is similar. Note that you still need a means of getting the memory image into memory and launching it at the right address (for Cromemco you can use RDOS) - I have a very tiny (<500 bytes) 8080 monitor which would work for this purpose. With CP/M you would need to have a second memory image with SYSGEN, and system tracks preloaded in memory, and possibly a third with the CPT client preloaded - but these should be possible, at which point you could use CPT to transfer over full disk images. I've been toying with the idea of writing a program to allow you to list the directory, and import/export files to/from a CP/M ImageDisk image (or perhaps just a straight binary disk image which IMDU can create)... This would allow the files to be used under a CP/M simulator that uses the DOS file system fairly easily ... too busy to even start right now, but perhaps sometime this winter. Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html