Mark B. after / between others on this thread: >The offline HP utility COPYUTIL will do this type of raw >backup/restore. >I've used it on both my 3000 and 9000 machines to take >special backups. I warn you though, it's got to be the world's >slowest backup program. We used it once too; or rather, our CE used it; to replace a drive that Predictive said was going bad. It worked fine and thereby saved a RELOAD; however, note that Mark's above warning is not an exaggeration. Since we have three volume sets on our machine (USER, BACKUP, and the <long_name>, doing an INSTALL of the <long_name> would have been noticeably faster than using COPYUTIL.... Of course if you have 100+ spindles and one of them in a large volume set fails, COPYUTIL could be a real timesaver.... The ever-present possibility, however low, that a single disc may for whatever reason decide to scramble itself leads me to put in three "non-plug" plugs; for things that will allow / will help avoid the need to resort to COPYUTIL and/or RELOAD: (1) Make sure PREDICTIVE SUPPORT is operational and the link to HP is working. Pay attention to what it reports; it has warned us of several discs that were starting to have problems before they failed catastrophically. (2) If you have anything more than a very small system, run more than one volume set. The slight additional complexity to manage > one is well worth it for the extra flexibility and benefits. (3) Run MirrorDisc/iX on all non-SYSTEM volume sets. The need for COPYUTIL or RELOAD is then moot... On all but the <long_name>, that is... An if HP will just implement mirroring of the <long_name>, the problem will be completely solved. :-) (4) Oops: One more thing (except that I'm not putting in a plug for this one): RAID. I still like the MirrorDisc solution.... Ken Sletten