Jerome Fine replies: I am not surprised. For a while, I was going to use raw RZ28D-E which are just ST32550N (3.5" 1/2 HT 2 GB) under E11 which can hold just about 64 RT-11 partitions. BUT, I could never easily bring them on line when I first booted W98SE. Instead, I powered up a Sony S-501 without the optical platter inserted. Since the platter is removable, W98SE was told to NOT complain. However, I then turned the power off on the Sony S-501 drive and turned the power on for the ST32550N drive. Miracles were performed and E11 was then able to see and: MOUNT DU0: SCSIn: (n was the SCSI ID for the drive) I concluded that since the ST32550N drive did not have a file structure (such as FAT32) recognized by W98SE, the W98SE, in its great wisdom, refused to bring the drive on-line. Problem seems to be that under Windows, format includes a file structure which must be one that is recognized by Windows. No possibility of a "FOREIGN" file structure is ever considered as a valid possibility by Microsoft. But it was almost trivial to work around the problem as explained above. Fortunately, Sony S-501 drives were also inexpensive as well as useful for making backups. The optical platters hold 295 MBytes per side while was sufficient even 5 years ago to be cost effective in holding 4 RT-11 partitions. Of course, now with SATA 2 drives with over 500 GB, there is so much room and these SATA 2 drives are so fast that the opticals are no longer very useful. And with 8 GB DVD-R media (I will eventually buy one although the 4 GB are still quite large enough), I still only need 3 DVD-R to hold a monthly backup of all my files. All of my RT-11 files fit on a single DVD-R. It really is amazing. I think it was around 1995 when I bought an XT8760E (600 MByte ESDI) for about $ 600 as an end of line sale item. Within a few years, I was able to buy Hitachi ESDI drives of the same size for about 10% and I used 3 such drives on the PDP-11/83 for many years with 2 drives for on-line backup and with TK70 for off-line backup. DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT - OFF TOPIC!! Well, I guess a lot of the previous stuff as well!! By 2002, I started using W98SE with 3 * 40 GB drives with 2 drives for on-line backup and DVD for off-line backup. My son wants me to switch to a Pentium 4 (after all, PCs only last about 3 years) using Windows XP and 3 * 320 GB drives. It looks like I will actually be able to keep all 37,607,912,018 prime numbers up to 10^12 in 18 files of 2 GB each (I only need a single byte to store the differences) using only 10% of the storage available. And I will still be able to run RT-11 under E11, but 100 times as fast as a PDP-11/93. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.