John C. Ellingboe wrote: I am going to try to boot it from a hard drive I have but if that fails I want to see if I can read some Computer Automation diskettes which I have current possesion of. I may not be able to use the box to read them, but data I have on them right now suggests I might. Any thoughts on the list as to how to archive the data? I know that Lars H. is going to do his thing, and owns them, but more ideas would be welcome. I think they are pretty vanilla system distribution diskettes, so hopefully CA had sense enough to use a "lower common denomentator" format, and not some exotic 1mb double sided double density format. The hardware we have suggests we have a single density 8" drive set, but I want to copy them sooner than I may be able to learn how to with the CA hardware. Since I don't own the hardware, I don't have final call on that anyway (owned by Lars, but in my temporary posession). I would not want to use a single system like this to try to copy the software anyway, just in case something was in the mood to burn up. Though the system came from a recently supported site, that site is no longer a viable place to get something repaired, so Lars' pile of hardware will soon be the best resource around, I suspect. I appreciate your effort to get me the diskettes for the Alspa. I can wait a bit at this point. I'll also let you know if any of the other parallel efforts to get the diskettes copied pays off too. This is just one avenue I can take, since I have a couple of working Alspa's. I just don't know if I put a boot on the corvus disk I dug up and whether it will boot or not. The whole pile was burried, and I foolishly didn't make sure a well labeled 8" disk got saved with the hardware, for this exact circumstance. All my 8" diskettes are in another state and not easily searchable right now. Jim .

Lars said something to me at the weekend about the disks that he has being a bit weird; the first track's laid down using FM density with the rest being MFM - and for some reason Imagedisk wasn't making sense of them even in "full analysis" mode. I'm not sure though if that was *all* CA disks, or just some of the ones he happened to have.