>Therefore, to me at least, it seems to be a disk-spanning problem. >Whether the problem is in creating it on the desktop or in reading it >on the laptop I don't know. I tried to extract the files using WinZip >to narrow it down further but WinZip requires an Add-on to extract >disk-spanned files. My copy of Winzip handles disk-spanned files out of box, as it were, with no need for an Add-on. I think what you are seeing is simply the inherent unreliability of floppies. If there's an error for every million bytes (for example), then the more data you have the more likely you are to encounter the problem. I finally gave up on floppies and switched to zip drives when my database went to three floppies and I could not reliably backup and restore that much data to floppies. I bought all new floppies, reformatted them, etc., all to no avail. I was always suspicious that one of the floppy drives on one of my three machines I was using was faulty, but I could never find a pattern in which machine the backups were created on vs. which machine couldn't read them. I got the point of verifying the backups immediately after making them, but still I often could not read them even then. Jerry Bryan _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8 is here: Try it free* for 2 months http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup