CLS / Bitt / Roger, thanks for answering.

OK, I'm with you all on the concept of creating a "tar ball" of the drive onto another device.

Unfortunately I have to assume / suspect the tape drive is toast and would prefer to "tar" onto another medium. Now, as it happens the computer has two hard drives, one with Linux and the other with Windows 3.11 (hmmm), would it be possible to create the tar ball onto the windows (dos) drive instead of the tape?

I assume if I wanted to do this I would first have to find out the identity of the dos drive, then mount the dos drive, then issue the tar command as......

tar cf /dev/<device name of dos drive> /

- Make sense Y/N

Cheers, Sim