Whereas I understand that the universe is chaotic, in computers I prefer consistancy, and the Beast is not. A4000T with unique '060 card and os 3.9 (possibly not stable under this os) so would it read like this: put a floppy in the drive to copy program over to HD to see if it runs under os 3.9. Floppy df0: is unreadable. So we power down, lay on side and open her up and redo cable to drive, everything looks good. Turn the thing on and df0: is readable. I start copying files until two return a 'error 11' file not copied. I try to copy into ram: as that has worked before and sure enough the files make it into ram:. Now try to move from ram into correct directory and error 11 pops up. Give up, reboot and try again. df0: unreadable. Do we have a possible bad cable, or capacitor or some other thingy failing, or does a tiny grimlin live in that floppy....? I can't drop from os 3.9 to os 3.1 until I can have a floppy drive that works all the time. Likewise because the Beast is an A4000T there is no external floppy port to use a different floppy drive. Are you suggesting I should rip apart the one working A4000D to use that floppy drive?? NO! I just got that one working really well..... What to do, what to do?