At my company we have been having problems creating variable length records to be read by an IBM system. Below is two questions that are still unanswered: 1. When putting a variable length record format to tape using FCOPY, the HP3000 writes a 2-byte block serial number and a 2-byte record control word (RCW). In order to read these tapes on the IBM , the block serial number and RCW must each be a 4 bytes. Is there a way to override system defaults to force the HP to write a 4-byte block serial number and a 4-byte RCW? 2. When putting a variable length record format to tape using FCOPY with the EBCDICOUT option, the HP3000 converts the RCW to EBCDIC. The RCW is a binary integer. Doing character transliteration results in the RCW containing a bad value and not the number of bytes in the record. Is there a way t prevent the conversion of the RCW and only convert the data bytes to EBCDIC? If anyone can answer the above questions we would appreciate very much. TIA Dave Jennings