CompuServe Messages

There *is* a way to backup disk-to-disk that is known to work, but it does not produce an image, bootable, target disk. You can use the /IMAGE:SAVE and /SAVE:savesetname switches on the BACKUP command, and it will produce a saveset on the target disk, rather akin to what VMS does. But if you were to do a DIR on the target disk after doing that, all you'd see is one big file in [0,0] called BACKUP.SYS (plus the other Files-11 "overhead" files) — no directory structure — so this does not help you if you need something from which you can instantaneously boot. It might be superior to magtape, though, since you have the second disk drive. (This is the technique used by MicroPDPs to backup to floppy, by the way.) To try the PIP /IM switch (if it exists) or any of the approaches Chris suggested, you don't need a system with DLs as much as a system with two disk drives. For that matter you could test it on a system with an RX50, just going floppy-to-floppy. If the target floppy ends up looking just like the original (as shown by a DIR [*] for instance), then you're 99% assured that the technique works… the only remaining question would be its bootability, and that *should* work too. You might also want to look in the RSX lib here to see if I didn't upload a copy of a program called IMAGECOPY about 5 or 6 years ago (!). I wrote this to do high-efficiency floppy-to-floppy copying on a MicroRSX system. It's in DECUS C and could easily be altered to do DL-to-DL. But you still have the problem of the output disk possibly being "logically inconsistent" due to work continuing on the source disk while the backup is in progress… and that inconsistency can be in structure (e.g. VFY will not be happy) as well as data. -Bill